Chocolate cigarettes and the affective memory blow – 02/14/2023 – Cozinha Bruta

A torrent of nostalgia was triggered by the news of the bankruptcy of the Pan chocolate factory. Pan, it is necessary to explain to someone who incarnated less than half a century ago, became famous for selling chocolate cigarettes – which had, on the packaging, pictures of boys holding the candy as an adult smoker wields a cigarette.

The cigarettes kept their shape, but the changing moods of the world forced them to dress up as pencils. I’d rather eat tobacco leaves than eat graphite, but anyway…

As I was saying, nostalgia for uncles has flooded social networks. Ah, the chocolate raisins. Ah, the cognac balls…

If there’s something we should never trust, it’s affective memory. Rediscovering sensations from past times is the certainty of disappointment.

It is especially true for the cheap sweets they gave us in childhood. I ate Pan’s chocolate coins, because my parents didn’t like to see me play with smoking anymore (it didn’t help, at 16 I started smoking and only stopped when I was 35).

I know perfectly well that the chocolate on the coins is ordinary – and not because it has deteriorated over time. I was a kid and I liked to eat junk food.

Pan is fully aware that it lives (did it live?) on the affective memory of my generation. So much so that the company’s slogan is “we don’t forget the sweet taste of childhood”.

Forget it, yes. Or rather, it transforms according to new acquired tastes, transmuting it into the memory of something that never really existed.

It also applies, unfortunately, to more personal memories. That aunt’s roast beef you haven’t visited in decades, for example. It wasn’t that she got old and lost her hand in the kitchen… you who had a romanticized memory of your own youth.

Realizing this is liberating. You evolve, that’s fine, grandma’s pasta won’t be upset about it.

But people insist on clinging to affective memory. “Ah, so-and-so beer was a thousand times better when it used well eagle in Agudos.”

Honestly, it’s neither impossible nor improbable that they changed the recipe for that beer. Except that it’s absolutely certain that you’ve learned to drink better and, if you were confronted with the beer of those days, you’d think it was just as bad.

It’s forward that you walk.

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