Of the five senses, your sense of smell supposedly evokes the strongest memories. My most powerful smell memory can be traced back to these large, wooden storage containers sitting on the cafeteria floor of the Field Museum. In an era when food safety took a backseat to nuclear holocaust, our grammar school class would place our brown bag lunches in these unrefrigerated germ vaults the morning of our arrival for a Field trip (no pun intended). They were more like incubators or distilleries, because for almost four hours, hundreds of tightly-packed, homemade lunches would ferment in these closed, dark, warm, moist hatcheries. At lunch time, we all gathered hungrily around the box. When the teacher lifted the lid on our overgrown Petri dish, the steamy sum total of every possible combination of bologna, peanut butter, salami, ham, mustard, American cheese, turkey, roast beef, Miracle Whip, chicken, pastrami, egg salad, jelly, mayo, pastrami, Velveeta, ketchup and wilted vegetables was enough to send the whole group reeling - and straight to the cafeteria line, using souvenir money for something a little less altered. Even the mummies would groan over the stench. If Hazmat teams existed back then, they would have stormed the place. To this day, just seeing a brown bag lunch makes me queasy. No wonder I go out for lunch every day….
Posted on: Wed, 02 Oct 2013 22:28:45 +0000
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