The Stupendous Memory Aid of Google Image Search

Kudos to the chowhound known as Limster for a fantastically helpful chowhounding tip. It's very specific in its usefulness, but if it suits you, it's a game-changer.

I can't keep everything I know about food in RAM. I'm not Rain Man. I will never have every fact at my fingertips.

Sometimes this becomes painfully obvious. If I haven't eaten, say, Chilean food in a while, and I find myself in a conversation with a Chilean, I might be unable to recall one single thing about the cuisine. It's embarrassing!

Less extreme, but even more mortifying, I'll be ordering at a counter and suddenly blank out the name of the cuisine's most important dish. If I had a dime for every time I've stood before a Gujurati clerk trying to remember the name of the yellow spongey stuff that looks like cornbread and is covered with black mustard seeds and cilantro, I'd have enough money to treat you to a nice dinner of whatever the hell the Japanese call the small, intense square of braised pork in the bottom of the large bowl.

The amnesia also works the other way. Here's an embarrassing secret: I don't recognize roughly half of food terms. Many sound so utterly unfamiliar that I carry a visceral feeling that I've barely eaten at all. I'm a rank newbie. Larva-like and blankly blinking. 

Of course, such scenarios drive us to our iPhones for salvation. Wikipedia isn't a great food resource, and web search will mostly cough up results from restaurant menus, which are only occasionally helpful. I (with the aforementioned Limster and others) created an app, "Eat Everywhere", which offers expert guidance in restaurants of unfamiliar cuisine (or familiar ones where you want to go deeper, or order for kids, or for vegetarians, or endear yourself to the waitstaff). But the app was never intended as an encyclopedia of dishes and dish names.

So a few minutes ago, like an idiot, I forgot what agedashi tofu is, even though I've had it a zillion times. So I did what Limster does: a Google image search. And it's like, oh yeah. A total flooding back of memory. I once again own agadeashi tofu, in about two seconds flat:

The best tips in life are gut simple. They're "duh". And this is one of them.

Of course, if you haven't eaten widely, a bunch of photos will only help so much. You still want to know what exactly the dish is. But if you're on the other end of the curve, having eaten widely, and need to briefly cut through the fog of Chowzheimer's, Google image search is salvation.

It also boosts my confidence, reminding me that I've eaten pretty much everything. Even the most unfamiliar-sounding dishes, when I actually see them, always look at least somewhat familiar.

Go visual, people. Go visual.