À la recherche du temps perdu

"À la recherche du temps perdu" or "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

The excerpt on Marcel Proust's description of la Madeleine read to us by Rhona in the fall 2010 Special Topics class from this book was in my mind the lightbulb that explained what we were trying to achieve with our semester-long project when it first began.

It was about taste, memory, satisfaction, joy, etc..

So much of this is removed in our "urban" or "student" or "fast" way of living. Food is seen as caloric intake and some are obsessed with counting while others don't care or don't have time to count. Marcel understood through his rediscovery of a childhood snack that in order to truly benefit form life, we need to stop every once and a while.