Nostalgia has always arrived for me through taste. Not through songs or photographs or old toys, but through flavors that act like tiny time machines. A sip, a bite, a sweetness on the tongue — and suddenly I’m somewhere else entirely, with someone I haven’t seen in years.
One of my earliest memories isn’t even a memory so much as a feeling: my mother’s father scooping the soft center out of a Three Musketeers bar and giving it to me when I was a baby. I don’t remember the moment itself, but I remember the tenderness of it. The sense that someone was offering me the best part. It’s nostalgia in texture form — soft, sweet, and safe.
Mountain Dew carries a different kind of childhood glow. My grandmother had a rule: I could only have a bottle if she bought extras for my grandfather’s lunch. It was a tiny loophole in the universe, and she let me slip through it with a conspiratorial kindness that still warms me. The taste isn’t just citrus and sugar; it’s the feeling of being chosen for delight, of being let into an adult ritual for a moment.
Zero bars belong entirely to my mother. We used to share them — a small ritual, a quiet sweetness passed back and forth. She died in 2016, and we don’t get to share candy anymore, but the flavor still opens a door. Not a sad one, exactly. More like a room filled with soft light. A sweetness with edges. A reminder that some flavors hold people long after they’re gone.
Bustelo is the deepest note in my nostalgia map. My old chef, John Michael Kinkaid, and I used to go to a Cuban restaurant for lattes before service — a small, grounding ritual carved out of the chaos of kitchen life. After he was killed in a car accident, the flavor changed. It became heavier, richer, something closer to a daily act of remembrance. I drink Bustelo every morning in his honor. It’s not just coffee; it’s continuation. A way of carrying him forward in the work, in the craft, in the quiet moments before the day begins.
Not all nostalgia is tied to people. Some of it belongs to eras. Sour Apple Jones Soda tastes like convenience stores with humming refrigerators, like being young enough to think sugar was a personality trait, like nights that felt wide open and unplanned. It’s neon-green possibility in a bottle.
Cherry Coke is the 1980s distilled into one sip — mall food courts, bright colors, and a kind of sweetness that believed in itself without irony. It’s a time capsule disguised as soda, a reminder that entire decades can be summoned with a single flavor.
When I look at all these tastes together, I see a kind of sensory biography. Childhood sweetness from my grandparents. Shared rituals with my mother. Mentorship and craft carried forward through Bustelo. Youthful freedom in neon soda and Cherry Coke fizz. A whole lineage of flavor, each one holding a person, a moment, or a version of myself I’ve grown out of but never really left behind.
Maybe that’s what nostalgia really is for me: not a longing to go back, but a recognition that the past is still here, tucked into the pantry, waiting to be remembered.
Scored by Copilot, conducted by Leslie Lanagan
Stories That Are All True 