Why Comfort Food Is Consoling or a Lover’s Scent Appealing

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We taste and smell our memories.

Sensory memory is, for the most part, involuntary. Involuntary memories occur without our conscious effort when certain cues encountered in everyday life, such as tastes and scents, trigger recollections of the past (see Marcˇetic, 2017). Images produced by memory recalled through a present taste or smell enable us to remember people we've lost, relive past pleasurable moments, and anticipate future possibilities. Thus, based on memories, what becomes a comfort food or the perceived appealing scent of a lover is predetermined.

The eternity of our emotional memories, to paraphrase Proust, becomes profoundly apparent when a present sensory experience, like eating a certain food, activates them. Taste involves recognition and memory, and numerous sensorial experiences can become activated once food reaches the mouth.

In my case, I'd been searching for decades for a cheese that matched what my Sicilian mother made every week from fresh goat milk. I had always wanted to experience her cheese's delicate flavor and texture again because it was terrific, but perhaps also to recall the fond images of her making it. One day, as I scanned cheeses in a local grocery store, I noticed the Skyhill Farm Goat Feta from Napa Valley and bought the cheese, anticipating that, like numerous others I had sampled over many years, it would have the undesirable “tang” that interfered with the true flavor of goat milk. But when I tasted this cheese, it was unexpectedly delectable, and it did, indeed, bring back joyful memories.

Similarly, we can long for the scent of a loved one that resides in memory. Perhaps the most famous example of anticipating an olfactory memory is found in Napoleon Bonaparte’s letter to Josephine, which expressed a remembered desire for the intensity of her scent (this possibly a historical myth, but it makes the point), stating, “Home in three days. Don’t bathe” (Lehman, 2017).

Historically accurate or not, we may identify with Napoleon’s preference (or be disgusted by it). In any case, personal preferences, beliefs, convictions, and values emerge from a lifetime of emotional experiences stored in implicit and explicit memories.

A particular odor can quickly trigger autobiographical memories, such as emotions and images from childhood. The processing of olfactory information begins in the cribriform plate—a small structure near the top of the head that lies along the base of the skull. Nerve cells transmit information from the cribriform plate to parts of the brain involving memory and emotion. As a result, various odors can increase our heart rate or elevate our blood pressure. On the other hand, something we smell—whether it is another person's scent or a “comfort food”—can also lower our heart rate and blood pressure, creating a sense of well-being or calmness.

The concept of involuntary memory is attributed not to neuroscientists but to the French novelist, essayist, and literary critic Marcel Proust. Proust recognized that involuntary memory enables emotional continuity, allowing us to taste a piece of eternity (Marčetić, 2017). In the early 1900s, Marcel Proust published a 4,300-page novel, In Search of Lost Time, in which he wrote about the involuntary memories activated by tasting a madeleine and drinking a cup of tea. He realized that the all-powerful joy he felt “was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savors... It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself.” (Proust, 1928, pp. 48–51)

Through our present sensory experiences, we consciously or unconsciously relive past joy, sorrow, disappointment, disgust, and other memories. As Proust so astutely noted, our sensory response to a present experience comes from within ourselves.