Food Trauma: The Secret Phenomena
Approximately 1 in 4 people can no longer eat certain foods due to a traumatic memory.
“How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.” — Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Mum is eleven-years old. It’s a frosted night, and she has just returned from the shops with a toffee apple. She goes out to play with her friends, but soon comes down with yet another migraine. Placing her toffee apple on the counter, she goes to the bathroom to throw up. Years go by, but the toffee apple remains.
What was once a sweet Winter treat has now become a deep seated aversion. The amygdala (the part of the brain which imprints the memory, ensuring you don’t face danger again) stores the emotional significance of the trauma, relating to our five senses. Bombay mix is a food that triggers my mouth to produce a copious amount of saliva. Somewhere, the pathways in my brain are sounding the alarm, trying to tell me the dangers. While I am adamant I will never return to Bombay mix, there are some foods that I have managed to return to years later. Why this happens, I am unsure. It is most likely that it all depends on the strength of the memory, and the amount of trauma caused.
As I mentioned previously, this phenomena includes all of the senses—including our sense of smell. Fragrance is a well-known trigger of memory, good and bad. If I am going to attend a specific event that I want to remember fondly, I will choose a specific fragrance to where, so I will always go back to that time whenever I smell it again. I came down with a bout of Norovirus in 2018, and just before I did, I had adorned Soap & Glory’s Naughty but Spice, and four years later, it still makes me queasy. The year after, I had what I now believe was Covid, and ended up extremely unwell for almost a month. On the very day I took a turn, I was wearing CLEAN’s Sueded Oud. With the CLEAN fragrance, I can just about tolerate it again.
Interestingly, my triggers differed in these two situations. I went to restaurants on both of these days, but only on the latter did I have anxiety about returning to the scene of the crime, as it were. The concept of food trauma isn’t really spoke about, but I suspect that’s because people don’t recognise it as trauma. Today, there is a distinction to be made between the words “trauma” and “traumatic”. Trauma is a word reserved for the after effects of violence, assault, abuse, etc. Whereas, something traumatic covers a lot more ground, can include ‘lesser’ evils, such as an aversion to food (if the experience relates to illness, rather than something violent).
Writing this, I am reminded of the Ludovico Technique from Anthony Burgess’ The Clockwork Orange. The protagonist, Alex, and his droogs, get off on ultraviolence. He is forced to undergo aversion therapy, in which his eyes are kept open by forceps, and he is pumped with chemicals to induce nausea and fear while watching violent videos. The idea is to diverge the pathways in Alex’s brain, so instead of being excited by ultraviolence, he will feel nausea and terror.
Subsequently, I think of a disturbing documentary where Dr Christian Jessen undertook gay conversion therapy. In an attempt to ‘rehabilitate’ LGBQTIA+ people, patients are given drugs to make them extremely ill, all the while watching material that would normally be a pleasurable experience. In this case, the amygdala response could be catastrophic to the future well-being of the patient. It is a vehement practice that must be eradicated.
Coming back to food, it all boils down to association. If you bit into an apple and lost a tooth, wouldn’t you have reservations about them afterwards? While I have mainly focused on food in this article, this issue extends to every part of life. If you were attacked by somebody, and they wore a certain style of shoe, you’d remember that. That shoe would become something far larger, and would most likely induce fear if you saw those shoes again—no matter who wears them.
This phenomena has fascinated me for years, especially given my own experiences with it. The brain is amazing, and it is the key to our existence, literally and figuratively. It is an enemy to ourselves; sabotaging us entirely.