“I still remember this taste”. Senses and emotions in perceiving cultural change

This article focuses on the problem of food memories within the context of individual life stories and collective histories from post-war Poland. The category of taste understood as a sensory experience, a cultural code, and a social norm provides an insight into the ways in which senses evoke and format memory, and how they become a tool for interpreting the past and evaluating the present. Taste memory influences both personal accounts of individual life events, but also the collective memory of the past. This memory is distinct to each generation and offers differing evaluations of the past and approaches to social changes. While the memory of the older generation is nostalgic and set within the discourse of loss, the younger generation’s memory is ambivalent, becoming either a mythical tale of a happy childhood or the means of criticizing the old and validating the present ways of life.