“Already, by thirteen weeks, the taste buds are mature. A thirteen-week-old foetus weighs maybe an ounce, with no fat under the skin, no air in the lungs. Yet already they can not only swallow but taste, and these sips of fluid leave memories.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“It is curious that we talk so little about the flavour of formula, given that it is the main food many babies taste for that crucial first year.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“Registering different flavours is one of the main ways that our bodies interact with the world around us. Amazingly enough, the human olfactory bulb is the only part of the central nervous system that is directly exposed to our environment, through the nasal cavity. Our other senses - sight, sound and touch - need to travel on a complicated journey via nerves along the spinal cord up to the brain. Smell and flavour, by contrast, surge direct from plate to nose.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“Flavour is not actually in food, any more than redness is in a rose or yellow in the sun. It is a fabrication of our brains and for each taste we create a mental ‘flavour image’, in the same way that we develop a memory bank of the faces of people we know. The difference is that whereas faces fade when you haven’t seen them in a while, flavours and smells have a way of lodging themselves in indelibly.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“What you taste as a child is still there in your adult brain, even if you haven’t thought of it for years.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“Molecules that look near-identical to a specialist chemist lab will be easily distinguished by an ordinary person who smells them.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“The experience of tasting food is far more multi-sensory than is the case with hearing, sight or touch, which is why it requires the most sophisticated part of our brain to process it. In fact, eating is influenced by hearing, sight or touch, as well as flavour: we prefer apples that crunch loudly, steaks that look blood-red, sauces so smooth they seem to caress the inside of our throats.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“Neuroscience confirms that chocolate means more to some people than others.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“The childhood foods that we ache for are very specific to the place and the time where we grew up.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“Childhood food memories, like family jokes, are often untranslatable to outsiders.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat