64 CalmMoment.comTaste sensation
“Food memories are so transportive because they run
deep along multiple channels,” says Lorrie Forsyth,
clinical psychologist and head of Maggie’s,
Lanarkshire – one of 24 Maggie’s centres
(maggiescentres.org) throughout the UK and abroad
that provide free support and advice to people with
cancer, and their families. “Eating is multi-sensory.
It stimulates all our senses – taste, smell, sight, touch
and hearing – and so cements, and then triggers,
memories on every level.”
Brain scans show that smell activates the
hippocampus and amygdala, both of which are
connected to processing emotions and creating
memories. That’s why, says Lorrie, we form strong
emotional associations with food.
“It evokes feelings of belonging, of being part
of something – be that a family, a celebration, a
friendship – and awakens recollections that are
incredibly powerful and vivid. Food is a vehicle that
takes us back to the time when that association was
made. Often those memories will be ones we cherish
and can derive comfort from – even the thought of,say, granny’s soup can soothe us long after granny
has gone. But the reverse can also be true. We have
visitors to Maggie’s who won’t eat pasta because
that’s all they could tolerate during their treatment,
and they don’t want to be reminded of that.”
Beyond these reasons, says anthropologist
John S Allen, author of The Omnivorous Mind: Our
Evolving Relationship with Food, lies an evolutionary
one, too. “Emotion and smell contribute to the power
of food memories, but the hippocampus has more
direct links to the digestive system. Many of the
hormones that regulate appetite, digestion and eating
behaviour have receptors in the hippocampus. Finding
food is so important to survival that the hippocampus
is primed to form memories about and around food.”
In other words, one likely explanation for why the
brain and gut are so closely connected is because the
survival of our species depended on it.Happy indulgence
Where there is memory and emotion there is also
nostalgia – and that’s the other thing our food
memories dish up, as the food writer Nigel Slater
illustrates in his excellent memoir, Toast. His narrative
connects us to the child and teenager he was through
the meals his adored mother – a terrible cook –
prepared. Though we haven’t had her burnt toast
and rock-hard Christmas cake, most of us will have
scraped charcoal off incinerated bread, and near
broken a tooth on slabs of icing. We identify both with
the boy and the mother, wrestling with mixer and the
mix, trying to bring both into submission.
Toast tells us what we already know – that the vital
ingredient for a fond food memory is not Michelin-
starred cooking. As John S Allen says, we eat as
much with our minds as our mouths and stomachs,
and perhaps even more so with our hearts. Good
memories are shaped by context – by circumstances.
Now, as I prepare meals for my mum, we’ve come full
circle. The feeder is the fed; the parent is the child;
the child the parent. The same dishes, the same
nourishment, the same stories she once told me to
coax me to eat, now coming from me. I’m still creating
memories – just for me, unfortunately, but they’re still
good ones, and they will sustain me once I no longer
have her with me.Treasuring recipes passed
down to us can help us
connect with loved ones
even after they're gone.We form strong emotional
connections with food; even
a simple soup can evoke
feelings of belonging.