Taste of Place

Episode 5

The Scent of Nostalgia

[00:00:00] Anna Sulan Masing: A taste of place, of time, of space, of memory. How do we find a way to belong, a way to look to the past and to build a future. My name is Dr. Anna Sulan Masing, and I hope to answer those questions as we explore taste and memory throughout the series. Welcome to Taste of Place, a Whetstone Radio Collective podcast.

[00:00:29] Anna Sulan Masing: In November, 2021, I was traveling back to London from Sarawak having attended my father's funeral. I was walking to catch a connecting flight through a nearly desolate Singapore airport closed due to Covid and was wanting to find a way to memorialize this time to imprint the sadness, as well as the celebratory aspects that a funeral also brings.

[00:00:52] Anna Sulan Masing: The one shop that was open was a perfume shop, and I remembered that the last perfume I got was a gift from my dad. In a complete [00:01:00] leap of faith, I rushed in, wafted scent around me until one settled on my skin like it belonged. I later worried I had been rushed, too careless in my decision, too frivolous. But once I got home to London, I realized it was perfect.

[00:01:16] Anna Sulan Masing: The perfume is light - with citrus and peony, but the base notes are patchouli and sandalwood. To me, it is bittersweet. It caught the moment. Spices have always been a big part of perfumery and scent is such an evocative way of recalling the past. Pepper, in particular, has such a strong and distinct aroma that it cannot help but elicit a strong reaction from everyone who smells it.

[00:01:42] Anna Sulan Masing: In this episode, the scent of nostalgia. I speak to perfumer and author Tanaïs, as well as psychologist, Dr. Kimberley Wilson, about the power of pepper to create and stir emotion.

[00:01:58] Tanaïs: My name is [00:02:00] Tanaïs, which is a portmanteau of my three given names, Tanwi Nandini Islam, and I am a novelist, an essayist, and a perfumer living in Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in the US. I was born in Illinois, and then we moved around a lot to Alabama and Missouri, Texas, and then settled in New York in the early nineties.

[00:02:24] Anna Sulan Masing: Smells capture place and time so vividly and Tanaïs speaks to these ideas, especially evocatively. I spoke with them about how we can use smell to remember people and places, and of course their relationship with pepper. 

[00:02:39] Tanaïs: I'm really into pepper right now because I'm basically immersed in the Sopranos, which is about 20 years too late.

[00:02:48] Tanaïs: But I was an activist in the early two thousands because we lived in a very intense world at that time as well. So I wasn't watching television that much. So now I'm eating Italian food using lots [00:03:00] of black pepper in my Cacio e pepe. Like found this new love for pepper, actually. Pepper for me, always sort of adds this really earthy and bright spice note at the very end of a dish.

[00:03:14] Tanaïs: So I do use it when I'm cooking Bangladeshi food or Indian food, or even stir frying. 

[00:03:22] Anna Sulan Masing: As with many of my guests who grew up in the West, Tanaïs took pepper for granted as a condiment that was always there. 

[00:03:30] Tanaïs: Now with my arsenal of knowledge, I, I can't believe that I didn't know that it was from somewhere else or that there are infinite varieties of peppers from all over Asia.

[00:03:40] Tanaïs: But growing up I associated salt and pepper as a duo. And I remember I lived in an apartment complex in St. Louis, Missouri. Our neighbors were very religious Christian people. My family is pretty religious Muslim people. I just remember Ruth and Greg and he was like, I [00:04:00] can't eat your food. It's too spicy for me.

[00:04:02] Tanaïs: Like I, I can only do salt and pepper, and he was a salt and pepper guy. That was my childhood context. When you see pepper growing on the stock and it's so beautiful and pungent and aromatic and intense, if we knew how it grew, then we would actually connect more to this condiment. 

[00:04:21] Anna Sulan Masing: Tanaïs' book, "In Sensorium: Notes for my People," is incredibly beautiful.

[00:04:27] Anna Sulan Masing: The book to me was like finding a new lens to look at the stories that we have been told about the past. Through the power of scent, Tanaïs is able to unravel the stories we think we know. In their book, Tanaïs asks, "ancient perfumes exist as fragments and texts, but what if we ourselves don't appear in texts?"

[00:04:51] Anna Sulan Masing: The dominant culture version of our histories becomes the record of power where lies misinterpretations and erasor abound. I call [00:05:00] these the patramyth - foundational Lies and mythologies recorded in histories to protect the powerful." This speaks to me so directly to some of the things we've explored in this podcast.

[00:05:13] Anna Sulan Masing: How the past can appear in the present with many falsehoods and within these myths of the past, and the ones we are still telling, the ones that were created to sell pepper, to sell Brexit and nationhood, what stories are being erased. Tanaïs also writes about how spices and fragrance get utilized and perfumes in the western world.

[00:05:37] Anna Sulan Masing: The western desire for these scents make them a commodity. And by doing so, exoticizes, the places that these spices are grown and exoticizes the past. To quote, "they [the West] yearn to belong to a sensuous past that existed before the colonizer arrived, before the violence and the genocide. But did that past ever exist?"

[00:05:59] Anna Sulan Masing: [00:06:00] It is with these thoughts in mind, the idea of the past, what is real, the pursuit to decolonize, to find agency and to exist outside of the exotic that I asked Tanaïs about their perfumes. So how does scent capture a place for you and how did you create that scent? 

[00:06:22] Tanaïs: The creation of place for me is something that really informs my perfumery practice, and I wanted to summon this New Delhi Sunscape with a perfume using materials that you can find in India in particular, but different parts of South Asia

[00:06:42] Tanaïs: of course. India obviously has more of a trade around harvesting materials for essential oils and such. I knew that I wanted to use materials that were interconnected and linked in the South Asian olfactory milieu [00:07:00] because I feel like that gives a point of view in a very rooted and textural, tactile kind of reality that I can be rooted in.

[00:07:12] Tanaïs: It's not something that is a concept, and I feel like growing up with a lot of conceptual perfumes in the nineties, especially like everyone smelled like CK one or Elizabeth Arden, that's the western perfumery praxis that I reject in what I'm creating. So I wanted to lace this with henna attire and saffron and marigold and carnation and rose, like these are flowers that are strung together on a garland and actual mala garland flowers.

[00:07:44] Tanaïs: And I wanted that to feel very deep and viscous. So I had notes of tobacco and nag Champa incense accord, to ground the base notes of that. So the overall effect is wafting incense through a flower [00:08:00] market or smoking a cigarette and smelling the fresh flour, the tobacco flower before you light it. And I just think wearing an experience on the skin makes it come more alive as a sensual and sensory memory.

[00:08:15] Anna Sulan Masing: One of the other things in your book I was thinking about is a decolonized approach to the idea of space. Is that the real queering and taking away the binaries around space and scent, really taking up space. 

[00:08:29] Tanaïs: I really love how you think of this taking up of space as sort of like a metaphor or the embodiment of queerness.

[00:08:39] Tanaïs: I definitely utilize this sense as a way to move beyond the binary, and I think part of something that I'm always dealing with, the way that we have an abundant experience wearing a perfume versus the extractive nature of creating a perfume, cuz it's still an [00:09:00] extractive process, taking something from the earth.

[00:09:02] Tanaïs: Even harvesting food, is that, I mean, any human imprint on the earth is that So why do we gender, something like fragrance. Why do we associate a certain type of femininity or masculinity or sexuality with fragrance, it doesn't actually make sense except that it hints at how disconnected we are from the earth in our embodiment and how we

[00:09:29] Tanaïs: do divide and try to conquer, not only you know ourselves among human beings, but just the planet itself. We are very divided and separated from nature. I'm very aware of how a perfume is a way to transport not only memory, but also the experience of wearing nature on the skin and that means a rose or a jasmine perfume isn't just the purview of a feminine person [00:10:00] or a woman.

[00:10:01] Tanaïs: It doesn't belong to anyone. It just belongs to anyone who wants to inhale that scent. So to me, it's like taking up that space to adorn yourself with something that is not associated with the way you wear your gender or know your gender and sexuality is something that's very queer and it's really powerful, I think, to connect people to that experience.

[00:10:26] Anna Sulan Masing: Absolutely. That's so beautiful. So what is your relationship with nostalgia and reconciling with the past? 

[00:10:31] Tanaïs: For me, it's less about nostalgia, which feels like holding onto a memory of the past that brings some sort of pleasure. I almost like to deepen the present experience by connecting all the different paths that I've had to more deeply understand myself, to prepare for the future. And

[00:10:57] Tanaïs: that means being entangled in [00:11:00] histories and narratives themselves that are complicated, messy, angry, all these different kind of unpleasant modes. And I guess nostalgia for me connotes a yearning for something that feels pleasurable or a better time. But when I look to the past, I don't know if I necessarily see that.

[00:11:21] Tanaïs: I think about my grandmother. Our first portal to the past is our parents, our lineage, our grandparents for many of us. And she loved the smell of Yardley English lavender, and she loved violet talcum powder. And she loved all these notes that are very English, honestly. And I felt like that was very juxtaposed with her actual fragrance of her body because she would

[00:11:48] Tanaïs: wear coconut oil in her hair. She would always have her tin with bon and the scent of rose powder and limestone paste and betta leaf and [00:12:00] anut all mixed together. That smell was very prominent. So those are very evocative of where she's from, where we're from, Bangladesh and South Asia. So I think this way that nostalgia can kind of be a yearning for

[00:12:16] Tanaïs: almost an a historic past versus what we actually smell like, or our funk or our embodiment. I think that's an interesting space that I try to evoke. Those are nostalgic moments that I totally live for. I talk a lot about it in my work how our sense of scent is a record of our traumatic experience too.

[00:12:42] Tanaïs: And for survivors of trauma or rape or abuse, those can be very jarring and triggering, um, touchpoints in experience. So I think like I'm always thinking of how you can be transported to a very violent place as well. And that was something that [00:13:00] came up in my research is when women were being saved from

[00:13:06] Tanaïs: houses that they were kept during the liberation war in 1971, in Bangladesh, which is the heart of this book, one of these volunteers who were helping these women out of these situations, Malika Kahn, talked about how she would wrap the women in a sari or even a piece of a sari, and it was soft and oiled from her own skin, and it would just be a touch and remembrance of a past self before they felt ruined by acts of violence and rape against them during the war. It's like the place beyond language and words is kind of, to me, that primordial beginning we each have and yearn to go to, and that is the most powerful place I can touch with a fragrance

[00:13:58] Anna Sulan Masing: Tanaïs and I then [00:14:00] speak specifically about their perfume, Lover's Rock, as it uses pepper, and is also about remembering someone. 

[00:14:07] Tanaïs: I love that fragrance for many reasons. I love that fragrance for the fact that it's an ode to one of my most significant lovers and friends trying to capture the smell of his oil that he would buy from a perfume Muslim perfume shop in Brooklyn.

[00:14:27] Tanaïs: And I wanted to recreate this homage to him and his body smells, but I didn't succeed in capturing that. You can easily buy that oil as well. So it's sort of a moot point. But that was sort of the genesis of that. And it's one of those scents that's very intoxicating because it has these very gourmand, ambery notes,

[00:14:50] Tanaïs: formerly known as Oriental, but those are very intoxicating notes. So it's spices, vanilla, which is also another like pepper associated with like [00:15:00] whiteness and childhood innocence. But vanilla oil is deep, dark, viscous black, brown, and it's harvested in Madagascar. So it is really nothing to do with innocence, Whiteness.

[00:15:14] Tanaïs: Pepper, it's very enlivening. It's a top note. It invites you in. It adds this edge, but it has a sweetness to it too. I think that's what's so interesting about pepper. It's like pungent and aromatic, but it's also, there's this quality where it really highlights the sweetness and floral notes. It becomes intoxicating.

[00:15:35] Tanaïs: You want a touch of that. It's something that is very intense in the beginning, but it fades fast too. It's very volatile. So it doesn't last forever. It's an invitation. It's the first punch. It's the first whiff, it's the beginning. 

[00:15:49] Anna Sulan Masing: So by top note, do you mean that that's the first thing you experience? 

[00:15:55] Tanaïs: Yes.

[00:15:56] Tanaïs: They're the most volatile experience in the perfume. They dry [00:16:00] down the fastest. It's very ephemeral. So citrus notes are classic top notes, evergreen. Those are notes that are very strong, but then they don't last on the skin. So you're left with a memory impress.

[00:16:19] Tanaïs: To create the perfume using English and Western terms and language, you have your head notes or top notes, heart notes and base notes. So when I'm perfuming I start with the base notes and I try to establish the most grounding sense in the perfume. My go-tos are sandalwood, tonka bean, cedarwood, like very, very like woodsy.

[00:16:47] Tanaïs: And it's almost like the way that these metaphors play out with the actual material you can really understand, like a base note is usually coming from some sort of wood or resonance [00:17:00] substance like fossilized amber. It's something that's ancient feeling and those last quite long on the skin. They're fixatives on the skin.

[00:17:09] Tanaïs: But then the heart notes, that is floral spices. So you would have your jasmine and tuberose and gardenia and rose as heart notes that open up the perfume that are the center and the core experience that you want the person to have. Something like cardamom would be more of a heart note, whereas black pepper, more of a top note.

[00:17:30] Tanaïs: So those are some of the ways that you start to like work with the materials is that you're starting with these heavier notes. Then you're letting it bloom into these heart notes and then you're adding the sort of like dash of top notes. And if you think about when you're cooking, it's like that too.

[00:17:44] Anna Sulan Masing: A quick side note: before this interview I had been burning the candle version of Mala scent and was wearing the Lover's Rock perfume. I love them. So much of my conversation with Tanaïs centers on creating evocative personal [00:18:00] connections, but I also wanted to explore the technical aspects of forging connections through the power of smell and flavor. To investigate, I sought out a scientific expert in the field.

[00:18:12] Kimberley Wilson: I am Kimberley Wilson. I'm a chartered psychologist and I have additional training and master's degree in nutrition, and a lot of my interest in work now sits at the intersection between psychology and food. So in my clinical practice that's often working with people with IBS, which is essentially is gut brain access, uh, functional disorder, but also around people with eating and feeding disorders or problems and thinking about our emotional and social relationships with food.

[00:18:40] Kimberley Wilson: So it's a venn diagram and I sit at that intersection between those two places. I'm just outside London, in the UK, in Hertfodshire.

[00:18:49] Anna Sulan Masing: Because of Kimberley's experience and our social and emotional connections with food, I was interested in how she relates food to place. 

[00:18:58] Kimberley Wilson: Growing up in a West [00:19:00] Indian household, I was just very familiar that a lot of the food I was eating wasn't from where I was born.

[00:19:06] Kimberley Wilson: Cause I was born in the UK and that the food I was eating had to come from far away. It had to be imported. We had to go to special markets in order to get access to the ingredients we needed to cook the foods that were of my culture and of my background. And so I guess I've always had a sense that food comes from far away.

[00:19:24] Kimberley Wilson: Listening to the elders, my grandparents talk about the foods that they would eat back home that they couldn't get here. There was always a sense for me of food being about place, and if you had the opportunity, some of it could come with you, but there were other foods out there that didn't move and you would have to go to them.

[00:19:43] Anna Sulan Masing: How does flavor work its way into ideas of nostalgia? 

[00:19:49] Kimberley Wilson: It's such a lovely question because you get the opportunity to really bring together, to marry the mechanistic and the subjective, [00:20:00] you know, the experiential, which I don't think we do very often, or perhaps very well in lots of food conversations. So if we're thinking about nostalgia, we first have to have a working idea of what that is.

[00:20:12] Kimberley Wilson: It's quite difficult to pin down what nostalgia is, but the easiest way to think about it is a kind of sense of longing. Some of the roots of the word go back to a sense of home and also a sense of aching. So a kind of aching for home, and it's about being transported back and often to a good place, a warm place, a safe place, a place that feels good and soothing.

[00:20:36] Kimberley Wilson: So if we use that as our kind of basic understanding of nostalgia, then there are lots of ways and reasons that smell and taste take us to those places. The primary one is that your sense of smell, so the nerves in your nose and the olfactory bowl are the only sense that has a direct connection to your hippocampus and your amygdala.[00:21:00] 

[00:21:00] Kimberley Wilson: So all of your other senses have to go through a little knob in the brain called the thalamus. And thalamus is kind of like the crossing guard. It's like, oh, you go over there and you go over there. But with smell, it goes directly into the amygdala and the hippocampus. And the amygdala is about recognizing novelty.

[00:21:20] Kimberley Wilson: It's about galvanizing the rest of the brain and the body to say, Oh, we need to act now. And so it's also thought about as the kind of threat detection center of the brain and the hippocampus is the part of the brain that is central to memory and memory consolidation. So we have this way that smell and taste because most of tastes smell, have a direct highway to your memory center.

[00:21:43] Kimberley Wilson: And the kind of biological evolutionary basis of that is that taste becomes central to survival, right? It's important because your mouth is where most often, most commonly, noxious and pathogenic things are gonna come. Eat some spoiled meat or [00:22:00] something like that, then you need to have a very active and efficient mechanism to recognize threat.

[00:22:06] Kimberley Wilson: And so what your brain will do is if it associates say a particular smell, then with later illness. You have a very quick, sharp memory the next time you smell that, to avoid it, to stay away from it. And that's when we bring emotion in as well. So the hippocampus and the amygdala are also related to emotion regulation and emotion as well as smell is associated with movement to a movement away from.

[00:22:33] Kimberley Wilson: So when we think about emotions, you can break them down into two types: emotions that drive you towards something or reversive emotions. So happiness, joy, comfort, connection, draw you in, whereas sadness, anger, you know, those sorts of emotions pull you away. And so there's this way in which both smell and emotion work together for your safety.

[00:22:58] Kimberley Wilson: There's so many kind of lovely [00:23:00] connections in there, but they're about safety, they're about connection and the importance of memory. In keeping you safe in our evolutionary context, but also of course in our day to day lives. 

[00:23:10] Anna Sulan Masing: When you put the idea of nostalgia into the mix, how does that complicate um, how we deal with memory?

[00:23:16] Kimberley Wilson: The thing about memory, if there is a threat based memory, often that is recorded quite accurately. And quite sharply. But in other types of memory, other sources of memory are more prone and more open to reconfiguration. You need to think about memory not as a systematic and accurate filing of things as they happened in the past, but there are kind of reconstruction of emotion, feeling sensations.

[00:23:42] Kimberley Wilson: And what we call valence, your internal sense of pleasantness or unpleasantness brought together. And so when you think you're remembering something, actually what you're doing is reconstructing aspects and images from the past based on what was happening in your body in that moment, [00:24:00] as well as the kind of external sensory experiences.

[00:24:02] Kimberley Wilson: And so when we think about nostalgia, often we are conjuring up a sensation, and it might not necessarily be particularly accurate, but because it's pleasant and we like it, we tend to leave it. We tend to think it's more accurate than it really is, but we tend to be transported back to a place. And the other thing about nostalgia is that it's often associated with a sense of belonging.

[00:24:29] Kimberley Wilson: You're transported back to the smell of your grandma's house or you're transported back to school dinners, it's about where you are in relation to other people. And so when we're drawn back into nostalgia, we're actually often being drawn back into those earlier connections. And so you get this tripartite, which is the, the biology of it, smells connect directly into your memory.

[00:24:55] Kimberley Wilson: And therefore it will trigger a memory along with our need for [00:25:00] soothing and connection and the importance of place and belonging for humans. We always need to feel connected. It's part of our neurology to be in connection with another, and so we are always us in relation to whatever context we're in at that moment.

[00:25:17] Anna Sulan Masing: For me, pepper is an ingredient that has become so much more than food. It is a context within which I view home and childhood. It is also a flavor profile, a spice and heat that feels like home. One of my most favorite foods is Sarawak laksa, which is packed with pepper and it is pure comfort for me. Laksa is eaten for breakfast.

[00:25:40] Anna Sulan Masing: It is full of protein and carbohydrates, and makes me feel sated to go fourth into the day with energy. I ask Kimberley about our connections with food and memory and how to navigate home through taste and the feelings of nourishment that food gives. 

[00:25:57] Kimberley Wilson: On a, a fundamental level, [00:26:00] just how well you are eating nutritionally will affect

[00:26:04] Kimberley Wilson: your mood states, the people who tend to eat healthier tend to just feel better. Their body's in a state of more positive valence, but gets a bit complicated. The foods that you grew up eating, so let's say every day after school you had the same tea and toast, your body is making a connection between the sustenance.

[00:26:24] Kimberley Wilson: The literally taking on the carbohydrates, and that gives you a good sense of valence. It makes your body feel good to get energy. So that tea and toast itself is creating a sense of positivity or good valence, but also you are connecting that emotionally with relief after a long day at school, someone being there to ask you how your day is or to give you a hug, the smell of your own home

[00:26:48] Kimberley Wilson: once you get in off the street and your brain doesn't remember things as individual moments, it remembers the total experience. So tea and toast for you will be all of those things. [00:27:00] A feeling of relief, a sense of coming home, seeing your mom in the living room, and you will kind of cluster all of that together into a subjective, emotional state that we might call nostalgia.

[00:27:14] Kimberley Wilson: And so when you get home as a grown adult after a very long day at work and you have tea and toast, what you do is to take yourself back, not just to that physical sustenance, but that entire feeling of relief, comfort, and soothing. And so that's why food is such a powerful way for us to feel comforted. For us to feel like we are home to take the edge off home sickness because physiologically takes us back to that place of origin and connection or wherever that memory was first generated.

[00:27:47] Kimberley Wilson: Nostalgia is open to reinterpretation and shifting, and it kind of has to be reinforced. It's one of the reasons, what's really interesting about the flavors, for example, that are familiar with the Western Christmas, the cinnamon and the [00:28:00] orange and all of that stuff. And we think of mixed spice as the flavor of Christmas.

[00:28:06] Kimberley Wilson: But actually that's simply because every Christmas we had mixed spice. It's just the associations we've made to them, and we could change them, but we would have to be quite deliberate. 

[00:28:16] Anna Sulan Masing: When we take a flavor that we know from a certain space of comfort and get shown or talked about it or get in a totally different light, like how do we navigate that shift?

[00:28:28] Kimberley Wilson: The first way that you would do that is with knowledge. We like to think of ourselves as rational, but from the very fact that most of your emotions are based on unconscious sensations in your body, we're not rational beings. We're responding often to things that are below our level of consciousness, but when you tie that inwith identity and belonging,

[00:28:47] Kimberley Wilson: as food does so powerfully, then it becomes something to defend. It's the way that people get really heated up about the right way to [00:29:00] make a cup of tea, you know? When I'm making a cup of tea, it's the way I was taught to do it. It was the way that I saw my mother do it a hundred times. It's the way that her mother taught her how to make it.

[00:29:12] Kimberley Wilson: It's the, the making of the tea, the ritual of the tea, the smell and the flavor, and getting it just right takes on a separate meaning, which is associated with place and identity. And it's that, that I'm defending when I'm saying the way you make tea is ridiculous. And that's why we have so many food tribes, particularly on social media, where food becomes a marker for identity.

[00:29:34] Kimberley Wilson: You never see it anywhere else. You don't go in for a job interview and say, Hi, I'm Kimberley Wilson. I'm a psychologist and a vegan. No one cares. But in situations and environments where there is less access to direct contact we use food as a shorthand for identity. Food has this effect on us because we are made of food.

[00:29:58] Kimberley Wilson: We are made of the food [00:30:00] that was fed to us by the people who loved us, and it begins to mean something quite different. 

[00:30:07] Anna Sulan Masing: The search for food and history and where food comes from is going to be jarring and is going to break down some of your memories and the way you look at your past and how you consumed things in quite a jarring way.

[00:30:18] Kimberley Wilson: Yeah, there's a way in which the things that are quotidian and just every day become background noise, go to the supermarket and I pick it up and it's all fine. And you have to make quite an effort to not just reconnect with food, but reconnect with the hands that have produced it. Because so much of the production manufacturer transport of food is now hidden and we don't see it.

[00:30:51] Anna Sulan Masing: What interests me so much in this conversation with Kimberley is how talking about something that feels so simple, such as how our [00:31:00] brain interprets smell, turned into a conversation about how we navigate identity and how we understand what food is and where it comes from. I was initially curious about the effects of flavor on memory, but the realization that we can actually create memory, nostalgia and an identity language through food

[00:31:19] Anna Sulan Masing: made me wonder how we can build new associations all using food. How can we re-see food and flavor? Can we build new stories and connections? 

[00:31:30] Kimberley Wilson: The important thing to know is that we like what we eat and we eat what we remember. It's not the case that we only eat the things that we like because we have to get to a point of liking it in the first place.

[00:31:41] Kimberley Wilson: What we tend to do is like the foods that we've always eaten and that are familiar to us and that we've eaten over and over and over again. And that's why sometimes foods in other, from other families or other cultures that feel very unfamiliar, feel [00:32:00] strange, but they're just everyday foods if you've grown up with them.

[00:32:03] Kimberley Wilson: So if you're wanting to get into eating something, it's about repetition. It's about trying it. And then even if you don't like it that much, that first day, try it again. Try it again. Come back the next day. Try it again. Try it again. The more you expose yourself to something, the more likely you are to like it.

[00:32:18] Kimberley Wilson: The people you spend most time with are the people you'll end up liking. Simply being exposed to a stimulus means that we tend to end up liking that thing. Certainly foods that fall into the alkaloids family, so it's the family that contains tobacco and cocaine, but also other bitter foods. The reason that we tend not to like them, we think, is evolutionarily

[00:32:43] Kimberley Wilson: the body knows that they're psychoactive, so you have an innate aversion to them. So you have to get around to liking these things. By repeated exposure, they become foods that you are drawn towards because you've turned off the alarm system in your brain that says this is a danger to be averted. Memory is a kind of [00:33:00] Synergy of patterns of kind of physical activation in the body, but also association so associative nodes in the brain.

[00:33:09] Kimberley Wilson: Say you are trying an oyster for the first time, then you are remembering not just the taste of that oyster and the effect of the nutrients from that oyster on your body will be embedded unconsciously, but also who you were with, the kind of general mood you were in, what temperature it was outside. Was it a sunny day?

[00:33:26] Kimberley Wilson: Was it kind of cold? Because that's gonna affect the valence, the kind of physiological state of your body in that moment, and that will be tied in with the memory of your first taste of an oyster. You should always try to eat new foods when you're in a good mood and relax because that's going to put your body in the best state to kind of accept it and to associate good feeling with the consumption of that food.

[00:33:49] Anna Sulan Masing: And of course, I wanted to know what food Kimberley thinks of when she thinks of pepper. 

[00:33:55] Kimberley Wilson: The first thing that comes to mind, there's an Ottolingi recipe that I made a few years ago, [00:34:00] black pepper tofu. The reason it's so prominent in my memory is just the amount of pepper in it. It's five tablespoons of pepper corns, and I just remember making this recipe and having a pile of pepper corns in this pestle and mortar and stirring it around trying to crush these peppercorns.

[00:34:18] Kimberley Wilson: So when I think about pepper, because that first bite of that dish, when you think about how much pepper it has in it, it's the most pepper you've ever eaten in one setting, in your life. 

[00:34:29] Anna Sulan Masing: Over the last few episodes, we looked at the links between the senses and food. These elements build on an encompassing idea of what ingredients can be, that they are part of our lives in multiple ways and have an extraordinary effect on us.

[00:34:43] Anna Sulan Masing: Pepper has so many stories to tell. It is familiar in every day and yet can continue to surprise us, whether that is in a recipe, a new way of looking at the plant or focusing on its scent. It is a multiplicity of pepper that allows it to be a conversation [00:35:00] starter and the catalyst of new connections.

[00:35:07] Anna Sulan Masing: Thank you so much for listening to episode five of Taste of Place. Thank you to my guests, Tanaïs and Kimberley Wilson for their time and generosity in sharing their experience. I'd like to thank my producer, Catherine Yang, audio editor Dayana Capulong, researcher Caroline Merrifield and intern Ashley Choi. I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder Stephen Satterfield, Whetstone Radio Collective executive producer Celine Glasier, sound engineer Max Kotelchuck, music Director Catherine Yang, managing producer Marvin Yueh, Associate Producer Quintin Lebeau, production coordinator, Shabnam Ferdowsi, poduction assistant Maha Sanad and publicist Melissa Haughton. The music created by Catherine Yang and [00:36:00] cover Art created by Whetstone Art Director Alex Bowman. You can learn more about this podcast on WhetstoneRadio.com, on Instagram and Twitter @WhetstoneRadio,

[00:36:11] Anna Sulan Masing: on TikTok @Whetstone Media and subscribe to our Spotify and YouTube channel, Whetstone Media for more podcast content. You can learn more about all things happening at Whestone at WhetstoneMedia.com.