BOCAGE • COUNTRY CLUB • HIGHLAND • JEFFERSON TERRACE • KENILWORTH • PERKINS • SOUTHDOWNS • UNIVERSITY CLUB
THE SOUTHSIDE
ADVOCATE T H E A D V O C AT E.C O M
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W e d n e s d ay, d e c e m b e r 4, 2024
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ALZHEIMER’S Q&A
Food stirs memories, but can also make new connections Is there a connection between food and memory?
PROVIDED PHOTOS
A volunteer fruit picker reaches for the high satsumas on a past Baton Rouge Green Citrus Pick event day.
SHARE THE FRUIT
Baton Rouge Green asks for volunteers ahead of City Citrus pick BY JOY HOLDEN Staff writer
Fresh Louisiana citrus is a common gift of friendship between neighbors and loved ones. Sharing the fruit with others is in Baton Rouge Green’s DNA, and the environmental nonprofit is now looking for volunteers for the 11th annual City Citrus pick event to help Louisianians in need. The organization is calling for volunteers to gather fresh citrus to deliver to the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank, which will distribute the fruit to the 11 parishes they serve. The event will be from 8 a.m. to noon Saturday, Dec. 14. Volunteers will meet at the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank to get instructions before the event begins. Baton Rouge Green organizes, trains, equips and sends out volunteer pickers to carefully harvest fruit without damaging the trees and then transport the fruit back to the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank. The City Citrus team instructs volunteers to trim off the fruit, not tug the fruit, and to abstain from climbing on trees. All volunteers are prepared to do no harm to the trees. There are two ways to get involved: volunteer a personal tree for picking and/or volunteer to pick. Since beginning the effort in 2014, the pick event has harvested more than 37,000 pounds of fruit. The group hopes to top the 40,000-pound mark with the 2024 harvest, which means bringing in
A young volunteer picker harvests citrus at a past Baton Rouge Green City Citrus Pick event. at least 3,000 pounds this year. Christopher Cooper, the director of operations of Baton Rouge Green and the state coordinator for urban community forestry, said the City Citrus pick event collected 6,500 pounds last year, and the city is in dire need of help this year. “Due to the ice storm in 2021 and the drought last year, the weather has really taken a toll on the citrus in our area,” he said. “There are some hits happening to our local citrus that are really setting the community back in terms of getting access to fresh local food. So, we are trying to encourage people to dig deep, because there’s a lot of citrus still on the branches out there that’s not fully getting utilized.”
City Citrus and Share the Fruit Cooper’s arrival at Baton Rouge Green in 2013 coincided with the beginning of the City Citrus project, which transforms urban green space into scalable citrus orchards that provide access to fresh fruit. He leads City Citrus now and says it’s his “passion project.” City Citrus has a program called Share the Fruit, which is funded by a federal urban forestry grant. Share the Fruit partners with nontraditional partners like Baton Roots Community Farm and the East Baton Rouge Parish Housing Authority to develop sustainable, open-source citrus orchards
ä See CITRUS, page 2G
Food can conjure sentimental connections to a happy or meaningful time when it engages multiple senses, including taste, smell, texture, sight and sound. This is called “flavor nostalgia.” Foods are deeply ingrained in our memories, especially around Thanksgiving. As children, many of our happiest moments centered around meals shared with family and friends, especially holiday feasts. The foods eaten during these times are associated with love, care and connection and become cherished childhood memories of shared meals. Jake Broder, an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health and Dr. Virginia Strum, a Greater Brain Health Institute Endowed Professor at the University of California at San Francisco, recently spoke at a UCSF speaker series event. They talked about the relationship between food and memory and their groundbreaking work to investigate how what we eat can enhance the quality of life for individuals with dementia or cognitive impairment. “It’s well known that art and music help and stimulate dementia patients in some form or other,” said Broder. “We’re also seeing that there’s a deeper tie to the inner workings of memory when you taste something. Sharing food is more about making a connection, as opposed to saying, ‘remember when,’ because sharing food is active, and in the now. “In the making of it, there’s remembering. But in the giving of it to others, there is creating new memories, and that continuum is important. For people living with these conditions, to be at the center like that is very empowering. This is a low-cost, low-risk, high-impact intervention. Everyone is eating anyway, and you don’t need fancy neurologists to do this. This is implementable by mindful midlevel practitioners.” Our brains are hard-wired to associate tastes and smells with memories. This is because the regions of the brain responsible for processing these senses — the amygdala
ä See FOOD, page 2G
WRESTLING WITH THE PAST
Danielle Deadwyler, left, and Ray Fisher star in Netflix’s ‘The Piano Lesson.’
ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO BY DAVID LEE
Adaptation of August Wilson’s ‘The Piano Lesson’ is both an impassioned The piano on the set of “The Piano Lesson” was not a mere prop. It family drama and profound ghost story BY JAKE COYLE AP film writer
could be played and the cast members often did. It was adorned with pictures of the Washington family and their ancestors. It was, John David Washington jokes, “No. 1 on the call sheet.” “We tried to haunt the piano itself, to charge it with that kind of spirit,” says Malcolm Washing-
ton, the film’s director and John David’s brother. In “The Piano Lesson,” August Wilson’s 1987 play, the piano is a central symbol of heritage, the past and survival. In 1930s Pittsburgh, it sits, unplayed, in the home of Berniece Charles
( Danielle Deadwyler), having been passed down as a family heirloom from the days of slavery. But Berenice’s visiting brother, Boy Willie ( John David Washington), wants to sell it to buy the
ä See ‘LESSON’, page 2G