Nan's shortbread. Mum's world-best lasagne. Sherbet straws from the dairy down the street.
Koro's hāngī. Road trip Jimmy's Pies. Long hot summers with 'the longest drink in town'.
Food and memories go hand-in-hand. There's no greater vessel for nostalgia than the smells and tastes of the past. The narrative may change, but the feeling is universal.
As humans, we're creatures of habit and notoriously self-indulgent. So it's no surprise that the foods we crave and reach for most often are those that bring us this sense of positive nostalgia. On the flip-side, certain flavours can bring up negative feelings associated with past events or even trauma. The connection between food and feeling is inseparable.
So why are our brains hard-wired to attach food-related sensations to our memory banks?
Photo: 123RF
Involuntary memory is a type of memory where recollections of past experiences occur without conscious effort by the individual to evoke them. This includes when everyday triggers, such as smell or taste, conjure an immediate memory response.
Often the association our brain has with this external stimulus is so strong that it can bring an intense emotional reaction, begin to recruit other sensory modalities to heighten the memory experience (e.g. a smell creating a visual flashback), and then set off a chain of further involuntary memories linked to the initial one - what I like to call the 'nostalgia black hole'.
This process is thought to explain what occurs when certain foods prompt us of our past. Remarkably, this form of involuntary memory is a relatively recent concept. Known as the Proust Phenomenon, the idea that food can cause involuntary autobiographical memory was first written about by French novelist Marcel Proust in 1913, where a sip of lime-blossom tea with crumbs of madeleine cake transports the novel's narrator to his childhood town, with vivid memories of buildings, gardens, people, and notably his aunt's bedroom; where he would drink the same tea and eat the same madeleines all those years ago.
This idea of sensations triggering the past becomes a theme throughout the novel, and hence the idea of involuntary memory is now attributed to Proust.
Due to the subjective nature of involuntary memories, the process has been relatively underexplored in the cognitive science field. Research does suggest that smell is the strongest of the memory senses, perhaps due to the more direct connection between our olfactory (smell) system and the parts of the brain responsible for memory formation (hippocampus) and emotional processing (amygdala).
A 2020 study noted that participant memories triggered by smell and taste were often memories that were more suppressed or less rehearsed in their regular consciousness, which is in-keeping with the subjective experience that it is often smells or tastes that evoke particularly poignant memories.
What is interesting is that while the process of food triggering a memory is involuntary in itself, intentionally choosing to (or choosing not to) eat or smell certain foods that trigger a particular memory is a voluntary action, and one that we can harness in our everyday lives.
At a basic level, I recommend that if there are certain foods that evoke strong, emotive memories through their taste or smell, consider how you can use this as a tool to reconnect with parts of yourself that may be forgotten or perhaps even your inner child.
Nostalgia can be an opportunity for self-reflection to better guide your future. You should also consider if there are any wholesome and nutritious foods that bring you positive nostalgia, and try to include these more frequently in your diet for an instant mid-week mood booster.
Photo: Taupo museum
At a more clinical level, as a doctor working in mental health I find it particularly interesting to consider how involuntary memory could be used in a therapeutic setting. Studies have shown that the use of individually-tailored smells can perhaps help to increase the quality of memories in dementia sufferers, and further research is being conducted in this area.
The potential for using taste and smell in the treatment of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is also fascinating. PTSD is a serious mental health condition where clinically significant psychological distress and functional impairment occurs following exposure to a traumatic stressor.
It includes avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma event - and while we often think of this as visual or audible cues, tastes and smells from the time of the trauma can be similarly triggering of involuntary intrusion symptoms (such as dissociation or flashbacks).
Perhaps there is further potential to use the power of taste and smell as an adjunct to tailored individual trauma therapy with a trained clinician - whether as part of symptom education, desensitisation to sensory memory triggers to reduce distress/avoidance, or as a tool to gradually face trauma-related memories and engage with the associated thoughts, feelings and emotions.
Photo: Wendy Morgan
As New Zealanders, our small population and famously narrow two-degrees of separation means that there is often overlap in our experiences of food nostalgia. It's a great leveller as a conversation device, whether debating whose Nana made the best boil-up or pinpointing which roadside tearooms had the finest custard square.
But what I encourage you to do is go beyond the superficial, and use the shared experience of nostalgia as a base to explore the individual's unique context at that time. Food can help us to better understand and connect with one another, enabling a deeper level of whakawhanaungatanga. Let's go down the nostalgia black hole together.
Alby Hailes is a doctor and food writer. His new cookbook, Good Vibes, will be published in August.
