Good Question: Why do certain foods produce such powerful memories?

A barbecue vendor works during the 2024 Ribfest in Charleston, W.Va. Food plays a pivotal roll in some individuals' memories.Photo byRibfest

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — With the fall festival season approaching, and thoughts of fair foods on the mind, it has me thinking: why do certain foods, such as candy apples and funnel cakes, harbor such powerful memories?

Now, I should preface this by saying that I come from a family of eaters. Not the typical you-need-to-eat-for-sustenance variety of eaters, either, though sustenance — "Did you get enough? Eat more, or you'll be hungry later!" — was always reason enough to eat.

My family is more of the eat-to-celebrate-your-very-existence variety. We'll eat for any occasion, large and small, or no occasion at all.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I harbor some powerful food memories.

One such memory stems from very early in my childhood. In this memory, I am sitting on my grandmother's table, my toddler legs dangling over the counter's edge, my tiny fists shoving steaming buckwheat pancakes ("buckwheat cakes" in local parlance) drowned in warmed syrup into my mouth. Even now, I can smell the earthy scent of milled buckwheat and buttermilk billowing from my grandmother's iron-hot griddle and taste the buttery-sweet dough on my tongue.

The visceral details of that day are as actual now as they were then, as if what I remember had just played out before my eyes.

Perhaps I have ingrained this food memory because of this occasion's celebratory nature. Growing up, buckwheat cakes were a once-a-year treat that coincided with the local buckwheat festival — an event that is an extension of who I am and where I come from.

Other foods from my life conjure memories, of course. To date, I've consumed a mountain's worth of biscuits, a testament to my family's Appalachian heritage and Southern identity. I've eaten hundreds of pepperoni rolls, that ubiquitous West Virginia delicacy gifted from Italian immigrant miner wives to the larger world. There are other foods with special memories, too — salt-rise bread, stack cakes, and my father's campfire french toast. Each of these has left its own delectable, indelible impression on my psyche, each with its own unique story.

As nostalgic as food memories like these may be, science would suggest that they're just another product of our biological selves, a gift begotten to us from our hominid ancestors so that our species might survive our trip through the evolutionary timeline. So how exactly do we form these food memories, and what purpose do they serve? To tell this tale, we'll need to start back — way back — to a time before we even knew how to cook.

Our foodie forefathers

Once upon a time, at least 2.6 million years ago, our biological forefathers ate a diet of raw meat, bark, insects, berries — basically anything they could find. This diet, undoubtedly unpleasant by modern standards, also made for a tough life. So much time and energy was spent explicitly looking for and chewing food that little was left for anything else.

Then one (or, perhaps, several) of our ancient hominid ancestors took a giant culinary leap and started cooking by fire.

This gastronomic disruption marks a significant milestone in our evolutionary history. Cooking by fire had many positive implications. By cooking food, our ancestors were able to:

• kill harmful bacteria (think Salmonella and E. coli) from meats and other food sources;
• increase the number of calories in the food available to the human digestive system;
• and make digestion more efficient.

Above all, eating cooked foods took less time and energy and allowed these hominid ancestors to ultimately become, well, more human.

Evolved cooking, evolved brains

Raw-eating hominids had smaller brains. This all changed about 1.8 million years ago when our direct human ancestor, Homo erectus, began to grow a bigger brain. Over 600,000 years, the brain of Homo erectus would double in size.

Brain growth would ultimately become one of the most significant assets for the human species.

There is some anthropological and archaeological evidence that shows a correlation between the growing brain and Homo erectus learning to cook. However, the actual date of when humans began cooking is still up for debate. Some researchers believe cooking is only 500,000 years old; others suggest it's much older.

Either way, the implications of cooking can be seen in the physiological development of humans. Because cooking softened foods and made chewing easier, rock-solid mandibles and extremely large incisors were no longer needed to tear through raw foods. As a result, Homo erectus began to develop smaller teeth and weaker jaws.

Food on our minds

Throughout all periods of human evolution, one thing remained constant: we've always been thinking about food. As John S. Alvin, author of The Omnivorous Mind, explains, our brains have been "primed to form memories about and around food."

In one respect, our collective food memories have acted as an evolutionary safeguard, helping us maintain and sustain our species. But just as equally important is the role food memories play on a unique, individualistic level.

To better understand our food memories, we first must understand how memory works within the brain.

Most food memories are classified as associative memories. As the name implies, associative memories are those we associate with specific triggers, such as smell or taste. Research shows that associative memories— including those memories related to food — are stored in both hemispheres of the brain in a section called the hippocampus. Interestingly, this area is also closely associated with other aspects of our food memories— namely, smell and emotion.

To be sure, most food memories are a combination of the byproducts of the food itself — taste, texture, aroma and the like. But food memories often have an underlying emotional element to them as well. We are triggered by certain foods because of the way these foods — or the environment in which we eat those foods — make us feel.

Gastronomy blogger Valencia Baker notes in her article The Power of Food Memories in Identity Formation, "Our brain's emotion centers are nearest to the brain's taste and smell processing centers, so it is undeniable that our understandings of self are interrelated to these senses and that food experiences have great association with them."

But food memories carry more than just emotional weight on our psyche. Such memories also play a role in the context of our social well-being and cultural lives.

Socio-cultural food memories

In a 2015 study published in the journal Appetite, researchers noted that the food we find comforting — and therefore most often relate to our food nostalgia — has a very specific social utility.

Imagine, for a moment, your favorite comfort food dish. What memories do you associate with it? Family gatherings? Holidays? Ordinary Sundays? Particularly memorable occasions that made a significant impact on your life? Now, imagine the first time you found yourself away from loved ones or your everyday, familiar environment— your freshman year in college, for instance. During this period of isolation, when your feelings of loneliness were at their highest, did you ever long for something familiar — something like that aforementioned comfort dish? If so, you may be acutely aware of the utility food memories play on an individual social-survival level.

In much the same way, food memories can also be drawn from the broader culture. This notion of culturally-familiar food memories becomes especially acute when one leaves his or her own culture and is immersed in another, unfamiliar one.

In her article, Baker, the gastronomy blogger, gives the example of eating a mango with her mother.

For me, smelling the peel of a mango, takes me back to eating mango in the backyard with my mom and sisters in San Diego, 1998. It also, immediately and somehow simultaneously, takes me back to the conversations I had with my mom about how she would eat mango with her brother in jungle trees growing up in the summers in Panama in the 1970s. My mother, in the 70's with her brother, and the 90's with my sisters and I, would eat the mango with her hands and teeth and nothing else. She would peel the skin off with her teeth, bite into the meat that surrounded the seed, and at the end, finally, put the shred of peeled skin halfway into her mouth and scrape the small layer of flesh that remained on the skin with the back of her front teeth. I learned to eat mango this way from watching her. Today, sometimes I use a knife and peeler, cut it into chunks, and eat it from a bowl with my hands or a fork. But every so often, when I eat it the way my mother taught me, the mango peel is right up close against my face, my olfactory nerves are charged, and the experience intimately forces me to smell the unique scent of the fruit and the peel in a deep way, both physically and emotionally.

As Baker explains, food memories allow us to "participate in the recreation of our social bonds, cultural values, and personal understandings of self."

Food memories in context

My childhood memory of buckwheat pancake gorging — or any other food memory you or I may have — can be rationalized in terms of our biological selves.

I can capture and store food memories because my brain, enlarged thanks to my hominid ancestors experimenting gastronomically with fire cooking, stores these memories in the hippocampus. I am free to pull this memory at any moment — when I'm lonely, say, or when I am outside my comfort zone and in need of something familiar.

To quote Baker: "Memories take us there."

So who's ready for a trip down (food) memory lane?

"Good Question" is an occasional series that explores the answers to timely queries.

Michael Ramsburg is a Kanawha County communities reporter. He can be reached at ramsburgreports@gmail.com or by calling 304-370-3067.