Lunchbox Memories

Think back to your middle school cafeteria. Mine had red walls and white tables with benches attached, the smell of spilled tomato sauce and milk in thawing ice ever present.

A girl prepares to eat her home-cooked meal. She unwraps the foil or unscrews the thermos cap and suddenly the smell of garlic and soy sauce and spices or anything that would be considered exotic and different amidst plastic-wrapped school lunches fills the cafeteria. Classmates gag in disgust. They plug their noses as they quickly lean in to see what the source of the smell is, then lean away.

Other kids snap open a Ziploc bag to take out a sandwich, cucumbers neatly lined in a row, cured meats, a bag of grapes, and a cardboard box of sweetened chocolate milk. The girl frowns at her own food and begins to eat regardless. As she swallows each bite, she forgets her parents’ early mornings of cutting vegetables and frying aromatics. Instead, she begins to dream of polymers and packaged food.

I am retelling the classic lunchbox tale — an overwrought memory in many childhoods, yet one that I feel like has become a part of the immigrant-story canon. Smells of spices, cooked veggies, and meats suddenly become the mediums through which identity and assimilation are configured. In grade school, the cafeteria becomes the battling ground for American-ness. But why?

We all know that our taste buds are responsible for discerning the five basic tastes. Neural impulses then transfer the signal these taste receptors receive to the gustatory cortex, an area of the brain reserved specifically for storing taste information. However, it isn’t just the taste of a food that counts as information input to the brain. In a multisensory system, smell and texture play a major role in how we experience food.

For example: if you pinch your nose when eating chocolate cake and cut off the olfactory sense, all you can taste is sweetness — the nuttiness and richness of the chocolate flavor are lost. Put simply, taste is incredibly influenced by smell.

Studies showing that these smell and taste inputs reach the anterior insular cortex — which is connected to sensory, emotional, and cognitive function and more specifically, odor recognition and reward and goal-seeking behavior.

Beyond its connection to neural networks, smell also carries a particular connection to memory.

As neuroscientist Rachel S. Herz told Harvard Magazine, “Smell can instantly trigger an emotional response along with a memory, and our emotional states have a very strong effect on our physical well-being.” The connection between taste, olfactory sensations, and brain signaling hail back to human evolution, where a sense of smell helped humans identify their surroundings and memories of past places.

Sandeep R. Datta, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, explained to Harvard Magazine that “you can think of the original brain as being a sense of smell,plus a sense of navigation, plus a sense of memory.”

“That explains why all those structures are so intimately connected, and why odor memories are so evocative,” he added.

Think about one of the most famous passages from Marcel Proust’s writing, when the taste of madeleine and tea takes him all the way back to his aunt’s home. Perhaps even more famous than Proust’s madeleine is when Anton Ego, the infamous food critic in Pixar’s “Ratatouille,” lifts a spoonful of the titular dish to his mouth and is transported back to his childhood in the French countryside.

The word associated with these examples is nostalgia — when a particular stimulus suddenly spurs you to a moment in the past.

Yet nostalgia is not a word we can take for granted. While today, it has more Proustian associations with remembrance, the word first emerged in 1688 to describe melancholia resulting from the political instability and conflict of the late 17th century. During World War I and the 20th century, nostalgia was similarly applied as a medical term to the feelings of immigrants who experienced homesickness and loss. Eventually, the word evolved into a more private and individual experience.

The modern-day connections associated with the word nostalgia are more tangible. The word is now used to describe a positive desire for a long-lost past. Even greater than remembrance for a collective past is the individual’s own history, where smells and taste often transport oneself back to core childhood memories: the soup or dish that’s cooked ‘just’ right — exactly like mom, dad, or a grandparent’s cooking.

Thus, there’s both scientific and historic reasons for why the smell of a home-cooked meal brings back a memory of the past. Especially because memories — the joyful, the shameful, the tearful — are particularly coupled with smells, identities can eventually become tied to food and consumption.

These recollections and memories associated with certain dishes have also become widely engrained in digital culture.

I discovered this connection a few years ago, when I took my first dose of short form food content. It began with unlimited access to screen time during the pandemic, and suddenly I was drawn into a world of crazy food creations — a savory-style baked alaska of lasagna layered on top of spaghetti with scotch eggs on the side, stacks of American cheese deep fried in oil, or multiple clips on the “best kitchen-tested brownie recipe.”

Over time, the content online evolved from the mass-produced videos by BuzzFeed or 5-Minute Crafts to people cooking in their home kitchens.

Suddenly, another world was open — a world freed from the dominating forces of Cake Boss and Master Chef. Instead of chefs who had spent decades building a career in the heat and flame of the fine dining world, here were adults who had just graduated college or left a long-time job to pursue fame using their phone cameras in their home kitchens.

What drew me most to these visual creations were the stories that accompanied them. Rather than people screaming in kitchens or Gordon Ramsay demanding the lamb sauce, these videos were more intimate, slower, and much less edited.

In one of her earlier videos, Tina Choi (or else known by her creator name Doobydobap) slides a sandwich across a table while in the voiceover she asks, “Was going to college worth it?” Choi reflects honestly, saying, “I barely remember anything”of her college classes — all the while cutting a bagel and toasting it in a mini oven.

In a similar creation, Joanne Lee Molinaro (known by her creator name “The Korean Vegan”) presents a peach galette to the camera. In her voiceover, she simultaneously explains her mother’s journey from North Korea to the United States. The video itself, which is less than 60 seconds, has old yellowing photos from Molinaro’s family presented alongside visuals of vegan cream cheese and sugar being combined in a bowl. Stories about Molinaro’s grandfather being enlisted in the South Korean army while she rolls out pastry dough.

A quick search on the internet of “why are food videos so fascinating?” will bring up articles by Spoon University and a LinkedIn post titled “The Psychology Behind Food and Beverage Video Marketing on Social Media.” The field of research seems small, but bringing together both the appeal and attraction of short form content and the human obsession with food and nourishment might provide a good enough explanation.

To be honest, I’m not sure what the scientific reason is behind our fascination with these videos of someone cooking and talking about their parents’ first few years in the U.S., their dog’s passing, their biggest failure, a recent breakup.

Still, there’s something profoundly appealing about watching the creation of food and dishes — the centerpieces of our culture and humanity — coupled with stories that aren’t as often shown in the media.

While I couldn’t smell or taste any of the creations from my phone, the combination of nourishment and storytelling created a kind of nostalgic intimacy. The foods I grew up eating that were anomalies in a school setting were becoming normalized — even celebrated. It marked a shift in my perception of self.

Many of these creators were Asian American women and children of immigrants. Their stories — often small or humorous reflections on life — reaffirmed my own. They shared slices of life, reflections about moments of their pasts, or explanations of dishes’ historical significance.

Not only do these creators’ dishes appear incredibly appealing through the screen, but the specific foods they chose to showcase hold greater cultural significance and diverge from the classic American meals shown in traditional media.

While it may have initially been the visual content and cooking on the screen that drew viewers, it was the creators’ stories and experiences — far from boring or reductive — that kept people watching and listening. Suddenly, the stories of the kid with the smelly food in the cafeteria was not an anomaly.

Today, online food and storytelling content have become so widespread that we often take this relationship for granted. The visual form of cooking accompanied by voiceovers seems obvious, but deeper examination of this digital form reveals why it has become so natural.

It’s truly a dizzying evolution of how our connection between food and memory has developed. While recent scientific research now confirms the ties between the olfactory and memories, much of this relationship had already been explored in books and films.

Now, with the advent of technology, foods and identities beyond the American kitchen repertoire are represented and explained. The lunchbox tale has become a cliché because enough stories have been told reiterating the scents, reactions, and otherness. Using food, with its smells and tastes and associations with nostalgia, as a medium to recall moments of the past, these lunchbox moments are no longer a singularity.

—Magazine writer Claire Jiang can be reached at claire.jiang@thecrimson.com or on X at @_clairejiang_. Her column “Taste of the Everyday” explores the personal, cultural, and historical multitudes that food and diet can hold.