A few weeks ago, I started eating almond milk yogurt. I hadn’t had yogurt in years - maybe the occasional mango lassi or something in a restaurant dish - but my memory of the dairy kind was still king.
The first spoonful was fine, the way a hotel bed is fine. You lie down and your body immediately tells you what it’s not. The plant yogurt was smooth and cold and tart, and my brain instantly protested. Not yogurt. How shrewd I was to spot this impostor so quickly.
I kept eating it because the macros fit. I mixed in frozen blueberries and basil seeds, which gave it the texture of chia pudding. For the first few days, I measured every bite against a memory - and the memory always won.
Food memories are generous. They store the best version, at the perfect temperature, from the time you were hungriest.
After about a week, the spoonful wasn’t “not yogurt” anymore - just the cold, tart thing with the blueberries bleeding purple through it. Then the bright, refreshing thing. I started looking forward to it. Then, craving it - reaching for the bowl before I’d even made coffee.
A memory can only override experience for so long. If you keep eating the new thing, eventually the new thing becomes the standard. The comparison falls away, and what’s left is just: do I want this? And it turns out I do.
Frozen veggie burgers had this problem for decades. People ate them as hamburger substitutes and tasted what was missing. Beyond and Impossible tried to fix this by closing the gap between beet and beef, but that just makes the comparison permanent. A well-seasoned black bean burger that you think of as its own thing - just a tasty sandwich - sidesteps the whole problem. You start wanting that sandwich, and you stop comparing.
Week 1 is a referendum on what we’re giving up. Week 2 is when it starts to become the thing we crave.