Canned Memories

Which memory does your mind turn to when you get a whiff of freshly baked biscuits? For Collin, it’s his grandmother’s dining room table, packed with aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered for a family meal. Collin’s grandmother was a graduate of Duke University and a chemist. According to Collin, she wasn’t a homemaker. She became a mom in the 1950s, when space-age food like Tang and boxed biscuits were popular and far easier to make than from-scratch recipes. “While I don’t love that [boxed] food, I love what I think of when I eat that. I think of my family. I think of my grandma, and I think of the time that she took to make that meal come together so that we could be together,” he explains.