First Bite: How We Learn to Eat. Bee Wilson

food talk became a survival mechanism to get through the endless days of boredom and brutality. A long-term POW recalled that after the first year and a half or so, the food talk had completely supplanted daydreams about women.

      Some men went so far as to write down elaborate menus and even recipes on scraps of paper. Film-maker Jan Thompson, who spent twenty years interviewing former American POWs for her 2012 documentary Never the Same, found that a common theme was writing down Thanksgiving menus, reconstructed from ‘memories of childhood gatherings’.³² All memory is a distortion, and in their half-starved state, these men constructed holiday menus more lavish than any of them can have actually enjoyed as a child. In Japan, Mess-Sergeant Morris Lewis felt oppressed by the responsibility of looking after his soldiers as well as himself. Sergeant Lewis kept himself ‘sane’ by writing down an extraordinary Thanksgiving dinner that included Virginia baked ham, fried rabbit, cranberry sauce, snowflake potatoes, candied sweet potatoes, buttered sweetcorn, buttered asparagus tips, green stuffed olives. Then, ‘Assorted Cookies’, ‘Assorted Nuts’, ‘Assorted Candies’, ‘Assorted Ice Cream’; also ‘Ass. Jams’ and ‘Fresh Ass. Fruit & Grapes’.

      This word ‘assorted’ is heart-rending, coming from a man whose diet has been reduced to abject monotony. Prison can famously expand the imagination. After all this time without biscuits, nuts, sweets and ice cream in any form, Sergeant Lewis was planning a meal where all these treats are freely offered in multiple varieties. He had returned to that old childhood pipe dream of being given free rein in a sweet shop.

      POW yearnings for childhood food were like an exaggerated version of the food nostalgia we all feel. What you are seeking to recover is not just the flavour in itself, but all the things that went with it: your family sitting round the table, the feeling of being cared for, the freedom from responsibility. This is why it’s possible to long for bad food too, just because of the happy connotations it may have. Not everyone grows up with a mother who turns out perfect apple pies. POW Russell Braddon, a ‘cheeky young Australian gunner’ who spent three years in Japanese camps, was thrilled to get a card from his sister. It arrived sixteen months after she first posted it and it had to be short because the limit was twenty-five words: ‘Dear Russ, Mum’s puddings are still as lumpy as ever. Oodles of love from us all. Pat.’ Braddon later said that this letter told me ‘all I wanted to know’: that his family did not accept he was dead and that ‘the old household jokes about my mother’s rather abandoned cooking still flourished’.

      The childhood foods that we ache for are very specific to the place and the time where we grew up. The American POWs did not dream of ‘sweetness’ in the abstract but of candied sweet potatoes and pie. E.P. Köster is a Dutch psychologist, an emeritus professor at the University of Utrecht, who works on the knotty question of why we choose some foods and not others. Köster is particularly preoccupied by the role of memory in shaping our gastronomic desires. His career has been unusual in that his work spans the cutting edge of both psychological thought and consumer science. In 2009 he lamented the fact that among many consumer scientists there was such ‘lack of understanding’ of the ‘fundamental insights from psychology’. Köster regrets that consumer research tends to be founded on the assumption that our food choices are rational and conscious when, most of the time, they are anything but.

      He traces his own strong preference for dark Bournville chocolate made by Cadbury’s – which during the war was the main brand of dark chocolate in Britain – to his memories of being thirteen years old in 1944, when the German-occupied Netherlands was suffering from extensive starvation. One day Köster was out riding his bicycle when a British RAF plane circled overhead. He saw one of the pilots throw a pack containing three bars of Bournville from the cockpit. He quickly grabbed them before anyone could stop him.

      On the way back, I slowly sucked morsels of one bar. It was heaven. The other two bars I shared with my brother and we ate them for days, a little each day. For the rest of my life I have longed for the taste of that chocolate and whenever I came to Britain the first thing I did was to buy a bar of it. I admit that there may be finer chocolates than Cadbury’s, but for me there is no chocolate more delicious.³³

      Childhood food memories, like family jokes, are often untranslatable to outsiders. If I gave you a small dinner plate containing three mounds, one of cottage cheese, one of chopped apple and one of raisins, you might think me a little odd. You might wrongly suspect me of trying to put you on some kind of low-carb or gluten-free diet. But if I served this to my sister, she would understand at once that I was giving her a nice bedtime snack, just like the ones my mother made for us when we crept downstairs in our pyjamas because we couldn’t get to sleep.

      The importance of shared childhood food memories for bonding families together can be seen among expats who carry their ‘homeland’ with them in the form of ingredients smuggled in suitcases. In Greece, they sometimes refer to this desire for the food of home as a ‘burning of the lips’.³⁴ When Greeks move abroad, their mothers will often send care packages of food containing such treats as ‘oregano, thyme, mountain tea, locally produced honey, figs, almonds, hard cheese and dried dark bread rings’. At college, I had a Greek friend called Athena, like the goddess, who received the most wonderful parcels from her mother, with slabs of sweet halva and vast bags of the freshest, crunchiest pistachio nuts. She laid them out in exotic pottery dishes. Somehow Athena’s student room always felt different from the rest of ours, though underneath it was the same scruffy bedsit. Surrounded by her foods from home, she had the air of someone who was never alone.

      Until it became easier to buy in supermarkets all over the world, Greeks also travelled with feta cheese. Often, they did not realize how much they would miss this damp white cheese until they were away from home, at which point they became desperate for another salty taste of it. In the words of a Greek academic who got a job at a university in Wales and once travelled back from Greece with a vast 10kg tin of feta cheese: ‘I would cut a piece with my meal every night. It was like “white gold” to me.’³⁵

      One of the functions of traditional cuisines is to reinforce these shared childhood food memories. Food anthropologist David Sutton found that there was a conscious element of remembering in many of the feasts held on the island of Kalymnos in the Aegean. Kalymnians use big ritualized meals as a way of planning to remember events in the future. There is nothing accidental about this remembering. When roast lamb is shared for Easter, it anchors all those eating it in a particular place and time. During a meal, Sutton found that his Kalymnian friends would often say to him, ‘Eat, in order to remember Kalymnos.’