Jaquel

name: Jaquel

collection #: ML10

collection location: The Chicken Coop, Mildred’s Lane, Beach Lake, PA

age: undisclosed

occupation: personal organizer

Relationship to food: afraid

Jaquel’s relationship to food is challenging. She is afraid of food. She explains to me that she ate poorly from childhood through early adulthood and as a consequence, has had a history of digestive trouble. As an adult she has found that her body works best when she doesn’t eat too much. So she eats a little at a time, otherwise she can’t digest it. (I should interject here that this does not make Jaquel a waif. She is hearty, vivacious, has beautiful red hair and is fit. She listens to her body enough to know its limitations and makes adjustments accordingly.) However, because of her relationship, she is afraid to dabble in new foods on her own. She seems to know what makes her healthy now and is afraid to push her body’s limits.

When I asked her about her food memories, she interestingly enough, had immediate memories of food from her childhood. She chose not to speak about the countess bags of chips and fast food she ate and instead specifically remembered eating walnuts at her grandmother’s and the process of cracking them open. Her grandmother worked at a camp and would bring home the spoils of the summer at the end of the season. She loved the colored candy on strips of white paper, candy buttons I believe they are called.

I did a little research on candy buttons, to find out their specific

name (which I mistakenly was calling dots) and found a page that shows you how to make them yourself. Sure, they don’t really taste like much, but that was never really the fascination about them in the first place, was it. What I loved about them myself as a child was the fact that they were on a big role in the store and you bought it by the row, tearing off as much or as little as you wanted. You could get a strip as tall as you, as it was inexpensive, and it would take days to eat that much candy off the paper. It was not cellophane wrapped as it is now and was immediate satisfaction. But I digress…

Jaquel also thought that broccoli looked like green trees as a child. She remembers eating the “heads” off the “trees” and getting in trouble for what her mother considered playing with her food. I think we should capitalize on this idea more…

At the end of her interview, after relieving these food memories from her childhood, Jaquel remarked to me that if she could start collecting food memories as an adult, she would like to remember what is was like when she started eating good food.

walnut image can be found at nature products.net

candy button image and blog entry about nostalgic candy can be found here