How Travel Changes the Taste of Memory

A friend of mine spent two weeks in Valencia in the autumn of 2018, ate paella at a small family-run restaurant near the Mercado Central, and has been talking about it ever since. He has tried, over the past several years, to reproduce that paella in his own kitchen at least a dozen times. He has bought bomba rice imported from Spain. He has used the correct pan, the correct stock, the correct saffron. He has stood in his kitchen with a wooden spoon and a copy of a recipe by a Valencian chef and produced, by any reasonable culinary standard, a credible paella. And every time, he tells me, it is wrong. Not bad. Just wrong. Something is missing that he cannot name.

I do not think the thing he is missing is in the rice. I think the thing he is missing is the version of himself who ate the original meal, and that version of himself does not exist in his Tokyo kitchen and cannot be reproduced no matter how good the saffron is.

There is a neuroscience to this that I find both clarifying and slightly painful to know, because once you understand it you can no longer pretend that your travel memories are objective. In 2005, the neuroscientists John Lisman and Anthony Grace published a paper proposing what they called the hippocampal-VTA loop — a circuit in which novel stimuli activate the brain's ventral tegmental area, the seat of dopamine production, which in turn floods the hippocampus with neurochemical signals that intensify the encoding of whatever experience is happening at that moment. Novelty, in other words, is not just registered by the brain. It is rewarded by the brain. Unfamiliar experiences are tagged for deep memory storage at the moment they happen, while familiar ones are filed in shallower registers. The brain has decided, on its own, that the new thing is more worth remembering than the old.

Layered on top of this is the olfactory pathway, which is the only sensory pathway in the human brain that bypasses the thalamus and routes its signals directly into the limbic system — the structures that govern emotion and memory. Smell is, neurologically, the most direct line we have between sensation and feeling. Rachel Herz, who has written extensively on this in The Scent of Desire and elsewhere, has documented that odour-evoked memories are reliably more emotional than memories triggered by other senses. They are also more durable. A particular smell associated with a particular meal in a particular city becomes, in the brain, a sealed unit. The smell of saffron rice, in my friend's case, is not just a smell. It is a key that opens a specific room in his memory — the heat of the Valencian afternoon, the noise of the market across the street, the slight disorientation of a vocabulary he was still learning, the company of the person he was travelling with. None of these things are in the paella he is now cooking in Tokyo, and so the key opens nothing.

This is why "I had the best paella of my life in Valencia" is a statement that is true and misleading at the same time. The food was almost certainly very good. Valencia is the place where paella was invented, and a family restaurant in the old city is exactly the kind of place where it would be made by people who have made it ten thousand times. But the difference between the paella in Valencia and the paella you cook at home is not entirely a difference in the paella. A large part of it is a difference in the brain that is doing the tasting. The brain in Valencia was in a novelty-flooded, dopamine-elevated, emotionally aroused state in which everything was being encoded at unusually high resolution. The brain in your kitchen at home, on a Tuesday night, is in a low-novelty, low-arousal state in which the same dish is being filed in a much shallower register. The food cannot win that contest. It would have to be twice as good as the original just to register as equivalent.

This is also why travel food memory outlasts restaurant food memory in a way that often surprises us. A meal at a good restaurant in your home city, eaten on a normal weeknight, will be largely forgotten within weeks. A meal at a less impressive restaurant in a foreign city, eaten while travelling, will be remembered for decades. The food in the local restaurant was probably better; the brain encoding it was less interested. The novelty signal was missing. The experience never qualified, neurochemically, for deep storage. The traveller's brain was operating in a mode that the regular's brain rarely enters.

I wrote about a related part of this in Why That Meal Abroad Still Haunts You, where I explored the historical evidence — Ibn Battuta's fourteenth-century travel writings, the Edo-period Japanese institution of meibutsu — that human civilizations have been quietly intuiting this for centuries. People have always known that food eaten while travelling is preserved in memory differently. They simply did not have the vocabulary of dopaminergic encoding to explain why.

What does this mean for the cook? It means something practical and slightly humbling. If you are trying to recreate a meal you ate abroad, and the food you produce in your home kitchen never quite matches the memory, you are not failing at the recipe. You are succeeding at the recipe and failing at the context, because the context is what the brain encoded. The recipe is reproducible. The brain state is not. This is not a counsel of despair — the recipe is still worth making, and a well-made paella in your own kitchen is still a good thing to eat — but it is a counsel of honesty. You will not get the Valencia paella back. What you can do, if you want the dish to live in your kitchen at all, is to build a new context around it. Invite friends. Use unfamiliar music. Open a bottle of something you do not usually drink. Eat outside if the weather permits. The brain that encodes this new meal will not be the brain that encoded the original, but it will at least be a brain operating in something closer to the elevated state in which the original was received. The food will be filed deeper. It will, in time, become a memory of its own.

The book I have written on this, Why Food Tastes Better When You Travel, is essentially an attempt to take this neuroscience seriously and follow it where it leads. It leads, I think, to a kinder relationship with our own memories. The food you remember from your travels was real food made by real people, and it was good. It was also, at the moment you ate it, being processed by a brain doing something it could not do at home. Both things are true. Knowing this does not diminish the memory. It makes the memory more honest. And it lets you stop blaming the rice.