I don’t know what possessed me to throw the box into my shopping trolley. No, that’s a lie, because I do. I was feeling low, stressed and grasping at straws to feel a familiar kind of comfort that didn’t involve me driving 40 minutes to my parents’ home in the suburbs to get a back scratch and a hair stroke from my poor old mum. On this particular day as I pushed the trolley around the supermarket, I realised comfort would have to be found in a favourite food from my childhood – a ‘food’ (and I now use that term loosely) I haven’t tasted in almost 30 years, but one I suddenly had a hankering for: fish fingers.
When I was a child, I used to pour lemon juice over eight fingers at a time, the memory of eating those succulent sticks in front of the TV show Alf was one of the happiest memories from my childhood. I can’t for the life of me work out why I thought I’d be able to replicate that feeling, but what I didn’t anticipate was just how awful and alien it would taste. “Oh my God, what is this crap?” I shouted as I spat the offending mouthful out into the bin and picked up the box. Had I purchased the wrong brand? Did it say "New and Improved Taste!" anywhere on the box? Nope, it was just me, my ageing tastebuds and oceans of time between mouthfuls.
Kids, we all know, don’t exactly have the most sophisticated of palates (researchers from, for example, discovered that food marketed with cartoons tasted better to children), and we also know that our tastebuds as we get older, with most adults losing their perception of bitterness as they age.
I can’t for the life of me work out why I thought I’d be able to replicate that feeling, but what I didn’t anticipate was just how awful and alien it would taste.
What then do we make of all those which show that food memory is one of the most powerful ways to effectively time travel – a single bite of a family favourite apparently able to momentarily transport you back in time to a place where everything was rose-tinted and jazz-hands-fantastic? Obviously it didn’t happen with the fish fingers, but would one of my other childhood favourites get me there? And more importantly, would any of them still taste as good as I remember them? I had to find out.
Chocolate cereal
The memory: if there’s one advantage to having guilt-ridden, shift-working parents, it’s the ability to eat chocolate cereal before school every morning. I would fill a salad bowl with the stuff and eat it as I watched cartoons in my school uniform. My kids swear this is the ultimate dream. “I wish you were a shift worker,” my elder daughter tells me in a huff.
The reality? Hmm, the box does not appear to have changed but when I open it, my nostrils almost sting from the aroma of super-sweet stuff I’m not sure could ever be classified as food. I pour in minimal milk – just as I did when I was a kid and I was wary of any goodness getting in the way of my sugar fix – and I am transported back in time briefly as I hear the familiar crackles. Maybe this won’t be so bad? But oh, how it is. I manage one mouthful and again, I’m running to the sink to rinse my mouth out. I feel like I’ve emptied 10 sachets of sugar into my mouth and that’s putting it politely.
Noodles
The memory: as a latch-key kid, I kicked off every afternoon snacking session with a bowl of in a variety of flavours. Sometimes, I would even eat two in a row.
The reality? Wow, the packets really do feel like an old friend and I’m pleased to discover that as I open up the sachet of ‘flavouring’, it still smells exactly how I remember it. So far, so good, but how do I describe the taste?
Not bad, but somehow … wrong. I feel like every mouthful is making its way down my body screaming, “I’m gonna mess you up!” and when I look at the list of ingredients, I realise it very well could.
Over the next week, I try more of the old favourites and discover none of them bring me comfort or joy.
I realise there’s something to be said about growing old (although not much more than that, I’m afraid), something to be said about leaving the past in the past and something to be said about driving 40 minutes to see your parents to get a back tickle when you need a little old-school comfort. With a bit of luck, they’ll even cook you a mighty fine dinner.
