Everyday Lifestyle series co-editor Dr. Laura Engel recently sat down to talk with Dr. Jeanine Weekes Schroer. During their discussion, Dr. Engel asked Dr. Schroer about her favorite recipe and whether it had any philosophical implications. What follows is Dr. Schroer’s response.
There are lots of philosophical ramifications of my favorite recipe. My favorite recipe is tuna noodle casserole. It’s my favorite because it’s the thing that I most associate with the comfort of my mother. When I got married, someone in my wedding party decided that a good shower gift would be to collect recipes from people in my life into a book and give it to me. I kind of stopped having cookbooks a couple of years ago, but I still have that one, and in it is my mother’s recipe. But I never use it.
My mom was born in the mid 1940s and was a product of the convenience era of food and housewifery. She worked full-time my entire life. I’m a person who grew up with an electric can opener in my household. No one has an electric can opener. Because if you’re opening that many cans, you’re doing something wrong. So this recipe has all of the hallmarks of the convenience era. You’re supposed to mix together a can of mixed vegetables with a can of soup, some egg noodles, a can of tuna, and maybe some breadcrumbs and some parmesan cheese. And I’m not a foodie, but that’s not how I make tuna noodle casserole. I steam green beans, steam or fry carrots and potatoes, I make a roux with cream, parmesan cheese and a little bit of flour, I usually use a whole wheat noodle. And when I eat it, it reminds me of my mom and of my mom’s recipe. But the recipe that I make that reminds me of my mom and the nostalgia of growing up is nothing like the recipe she used to make. One time when I was an adult I asked her something like “How do you get this thing to happen in your casserole?” and she said “I don’t do that.”
So this recollection I have of this food that reminds me of childhood and comfort is nothing like what I must have actually been eating. But it still makes me feel connected to my mom. And it still makes me feel connected to the things that I liked.
And it seems like, philosophically, there should be a problem with this, that what I’m remembering is so different from what it actually was. Metaphysically, it just seems profoundly disconnected from “real” reality. It seems like that should make me not think of this as her tuna casserole, and not think of that as my favorite.
It’s hard for me to believe that what it was actually made of tastes good. But what I make now tastes good, and it reminds me of that recipe.
It’s been such a long time and it’s so far away that it doesn’t even seem sensible to talk about it as a false memory. It seems even weirder and worse than a false memory.
And then there’s the problem about nostalgia—that I can have this memory that is clearly and without qualification inaccurate, but that it still feels like me looking back on this good thing that happened in the past. I still have a nostalgic feeling. Even though I know that objectively none of this is how it actually was.
If I said something about blueberry pie and how it made me nostalgic for my childhood, and you asked me if I ate a lot of blueberry pie when I was a kid, and I said no, I ate chocolate cake, this would seem wrong. But chocolate cake and blueberry pie are almost no more different than the two tuna noodle casserole recipes.
I think that the “real” reality of these things is shaped by the values that I impose upon them. That is to say, I don’t think what makes it my mom’s tuna noodle casserole is what it’s made out of and that I followed the same instructions to make it. I think what makes it my mom’s is the feeling that I get from making it and eating it. And in order for me to get that feeling, I have to make it using different ingredients. And that’s what makes it her tuna casserole to me, not in the hard metaphysical sense, but in a softer one. It’s something having to do with a smell that was warm and pleasant, and a taste that was cheesy and pleasant, and some noodles, and some vegetables, and the fact that my mom knew it was my favorite, and so when my friends asked her for a recipe to put in that cookbook she knew which recipe to put in. And already by the time she did that it probably wouldn’t have been a recipe that I would follow, and she probably knew that too.
She knew that this was a through line from her to me that would carry on, that this was what I would want, even if the way that I would have used it would have been different.
Jeanine Weekes Schroer
Dr. Jeanine Weekes Schroer is a philosopher of race and feminist theory and an Associate Professor of philosophy at UMD and currently Head of the Department of Geography & Philosophy. Her teaching and research concern the ethics and politics of social oppression and its remedies, including the metaphysics of race and racism; feminist ethics and social theory; and empirical and experimental philosophical approaches to racism, sexism, and ethics.
