Why our favourite childhood memories all revolve around food

Ever wondered why you've a particular attachment to a certain brand of biscuit? Or why you're so prone to eating chocolate cake when you're feeling a little flat? Or experienced that time-travelling sensation when tucking into fish and chips of being transported to a childhood seaside holiday?

Research into our ever-increasing interest in food, just revealed, shows how rooted in the past our enjoyment of food can be. It discovered that above everything else, whether people, places or languages spoken, food makes up our three most cherished and easily remembered childhood memories.

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The science of smell

Science suggests it's a fact that connects us all. For as well as being able to admit that we have favourite meals, or unique, preferred, ways of cooking particular ingredients, we're universally connected by the way our grub provides us with an instant and irresistible set of images straight from yesteryear.

The survey, conducted by cheese and bacon producer Denhay Farms, suggests that the leading memory (24% of us) is of sitting down to Christmas turkey with all the trimmings. Fish and chips by the seaside comes in second, while in third is the set of meals we may well know as the ones we loved to hate: school dinners.

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"For me, every time I smell rabbit stew brewed with lovely onions and shallots, it reminds me of my auntie," explains Nick Schizas, head chef at Antico Restaurant & Bar in London.

"Every summer when I was a child, my whole family would gather together and have a large feast at my grandfather's house. In the end, it all relates to one's sense of smell. Those different aromas are something you carry and have for the rest of your life and they always manage to take you back to that particular moment in time."

Smell as time traveller

"Smell is the instantaneous hit our brains receive with just about anything we come into contact with..."

Smells, as referred to by Nick, can be powerful time travellers. A whiff of an ex's scent lingering on a scarf can be enough, for example, to send us into a long and detailed session of remembrance (good or bad!). The same goes for food.

Wilma Kirsten, a nutrition consultant, explains, "If you think about it, when we smell something, it goes straight up our nose into the prefrontal cortex of our brain, so even if we didn't want to, smell is the very first thing that we recognise when we approach something new in our surrounding area.

"Taste and digestive powers come after food, so smell is the instantaneous hit our brains receive with just about anything we come into contact with. That's why they say that if estate agents were to place freshly baked cookies or a delectable meal in a house that is up for viewing, there's more chance it'll be a hit with newcomers."

Adam Byatt, chef patron of Trinity Restaurant and Bistro Union, both in Clapham, has his own take on this connection.

"Food," he says, "is the natural bonding experience between mother and baby, our connection with food as both survival and comfort runs deep and from an early age. Thereafter the time we spend with our mother's cooking are precious and memorable, and meal times spent with family eating are although rare can be memorable and again comforting. Then of course there is the memory of our first bite of a ripe peach, freshly picked strawberry, a memory surely only nullified by our first kiss."

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Our childhoods also play a key role in our eating habits as adults. Interestingly, the food we eat as children, along with the meals we adore and despise in equal measure, somehow tend to return in shaping our later diets. What we see, feel, taste and experience in our first encounters with vegetables, dough, pasta, bread and jam (among other provisions) seems to form a fundamental first impression that we find hard to shift from our mind.

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Smells like home

Take Michelin-starred chef Marcus Wareing, whose culinary-focused immediate family is an obvious influence on his career. He explains, "I first became involved with food through my father who was a fruit and vegetable merchant in the north west. In order to spend time with him and to earn a bit of pocket money I helped him out by packing potatoes. I then got involved with cooking through my older brother Brian, who was a chef, and I eventually followed in his footsteps and left school at 15 to go to catering college."

Our family - the one we credit with those unforgettable Christmas dinners, and who so often teach us the basic skills of cutting meat and using a knife for ourselves - plays an important role in our enjoyment of food. For some, the memory of eating a meal is always accompanied by a memory of the person who cooked or shared it. The two, together, provide a dominant memory web. As Wilma Kirsten explains, "We are social animals and so it's only natural that we find love and comfort in the food we're given when we're together with others."

Ultimately, some memories are hard to erase. It seems our love of food, and our memories of them, are both physical and emotional. With the economy on the skids, is it any wonder our need for comfort (and comfort food) reveals itself in nostalgia?

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What do you think, do you agree with the research results? What is your favourite childhood memory? Or do we all take what we eat far too seriously these days? Let us know in the comments section below...