You Are What You Eat

by Russell Wangersky

Walking the other morning, I caught a hint of something in the air. It was the smell of bacon on the wind – but not just any bacon. No, more of a penny dropping than just that. A smell of bacon the way it used to smell when I was a teenager, and particularly, when we used to visit my mother’s family at their summer cottages in Maine. I inhaled the savory scent and wondered: What is it about smells that sets their hooks so deeply into us?

I tried to think where exactly that bacon would have come from. My mother was a “locavore” in the 1960s and ‘70s – before the term even existed. That meant bacon had to have been close company. It was a smell that brought me back to my childhood home in Halifax and particularly the cold room in the basement. I can still picture the bacon hanging from the ceiling, the air chill but still smoky.  

This same local theme prevailed in various aspects of our diet. For instance, over the furnace, it was not uncommon to find local wild mushrooms – boletes, chanterelles and others – drying on racks of repurposed window screens. When mushrooms were out of season, it was peeled and sliced apples on the drying racks. If that wasn’t enough work, there was homemade wine to be put down and later bottled.

Fall fruit was more likely to be apples and pears than anything else, and in the later parts of the winter, we enjoyed russets or other varieties that overwintered well.

Eggs came from a local man I only ever knew as “the egg man.” He put my mother in touch with a beef and hog farmer. Several times a year, a half a pig or some large portion of steer would appear in large waxed cardboard boxes to be cut up further and packaged in the deep freeze for later.
My dad and I fished for fun, and the fresh cod, pollock, flounder and Mackeral we caught all found its way onto the plate or into the freezer.
We ate in season, whether it was fish or fowl.

We weren’t a country family with a market garden, when I was a kid. We were rather a family connected to the food we ate – partially because it was cheaper, and partially because my mother liked it that way.

My mother has always been independent in that way. Her autonomous nature is reflected by her choice of food; she could provide for her family on her own – without the crutch of the nearby grocery store.

Although my childhood may seem like an exceptional case, I think I am far from unique. Perhaps I am unique based on the vivid set of experiences I have collected, but far from unique in the intense relationship with the food we all eat and the things we drink.

Unless your tastebuds and nose are hopelessly worn out, those smells are the keys that unlock memory. Remember your family’s food, and everything else comes storming back as well. All because of, all brought back by, one fleetingly familiar smell nestled in the wind. And if the smell of bacon isn’t reminder enough, I could tell you about my dad’s regular Saturday journey to a basement Halifax coffee roastery for fresh beans, or his second stop, at a local delicatessen that made its own fresh-smoked pepperoni…