Edible Memory Quotes

“I came upon the links between a simple midday meal and the complex webs of history and geography in which we dwell. I learned the ways a tomato can evoke the past and an apple can offer hope for the future.”
― Jennifer A. Jordan, Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods

“While this book focuses on the heirloom food movement, I argue that edible memory is far more expansive than simply the way people treat old-fashioned tomatoes or apples. Based on my observations, edible memory is something people enact with regard to a whole range of foods--including some of the most highly processed foods around. The heirloom varieties I focus on in most of this book are a particularly charged site of the intersections of food, memory, and meaning, but they serve as one rich example of a much larger process.”
― Jennifer A. Jordan, Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods

“Many seed savers see themselves as stewards, not only of their own family memories but of the shared stories and genetic codes contained within these plants. This kind of recollection works against collective forgetting and the widespread disappearance of so many agricultural plants and animals. Old localized, traditional varieties of plants and animals fell (or were pushed) out of everyday use as agriculture became increasingly large scale, industrialized, and standardized, relying on ever fewer varieties in order to achieve the high levels of uniformity and predictability expected not only by stockholders but also by grocery store shoppers. The loss of biodiversity also means a broader form of forgetting.”
― Jennifer A. Jordan, Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods

“In some respects supermarket apples represent a kind of collective forgetting—of flavors, textures, and aromas, of landscapes and foliage. Forgetting can be far more difficult to study than remembering, because its traces are much harder to discern.”
― Jennifer A. Jordan, Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods