The Reporter's Kitchen Reading Response

When I was reading this essay, something came to my mind, something that I had said to my friend when I was in Morocco: Foodies like good food but first they like traveling.  The reporter tells her memories, all of them related to cook and kitchen, from her first memories since she was a child and made her first dish and then tells the different dishes she learnt and made in different parts of the world.

Our memories and feelings as a whole make our own life and thanks to it we can identify a smell or flavour with a place in which we have been before or something that we have experimented previously. I was lucky to have a sort of feeling, I could define it as a flashback, while I was reading this chapter. While the author was telling her feelings when she was in Morocco in the little town of Meknes, reporting a story about the berber traditional wedding, she uses two adjectives to describe the place, wild and unpleasant that unfortunately reminded me the feeling I had when i was in Meknes. Then I started thinking that maybe our memories may be similar even identical.

But this not happened to me when I read the word tagine. That only word make me go back to that summer in Marrakech. In Jamaa el Fna, the main square of Marrakech was crowded of tourists with tired and angry faces complaining about the insistence of local people for just earn a couple of dirhams, some men dressed with traditional costumes wondering the square looking for someone who wanted to take a photo with them, snake charmers sitting in the ground, little monkeys in the streets used as an entertainment and fun. And I was there, excited and curious, in a little and hot restaurant crowded of local people, not tourists just ordering omelette with salad, waitinf for my first tagine. All those memories hit my mind when I just saw the word tagine. That smell of boiled potatos, tomatos and olives mixes with different spices was incredible, it was like tasting the moroccan culture in one dish. In this moment I realised that maybe others may have tried a tagine in Marrakech, but I am sure that my memories and my perception are different from theirs. The author of this essay just with her writing make me go back to that moment and I felt like traveling and visiting places that I have never been in.