Ed Balls’ secret to recalling life-long memories

If the smell of a roast dinner, fish and chips, a bag of crisps or a favourite sweet, triggers memories of childhood, there may be a good reason. Former education minister, Strictly favourite, and Celebrity Best Home Cook winner Ed Balls says he can recall being at childhood dinners, more recent family meals and political lunches in delicious detail, and it seems the food may be the reason why.

“Food memories are more sensory than other memories in that they involve all five senses, so when you’re that thoroughly engaged with the stimulus it has a more powerful effect,” Susan Whitborne, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, has said. Ed agrees: “You’re partly transported back by the food, what it would look like, how it would smell and how it would taste…. the food triggers a much wider memory, which is partly why it is so powerful as a way of bringing people together.”

The power of childhood foods to trigger memories

Childhood foods bring a comfortable, nostalgic feeling to many. Ed finds they unlock memories of experiences, relationships, sounds and emotions too. Eating crab transports him back to his aunt and uncle’s house in Sheringham on the north Norfolk Coast. “The crab and its texture and smell takes me back to being younger, with my mum and dad. I could then think how my uncle always had a bowls set that was a bit battered and we played on the grass. I could remember my mum and aunt, how they would be, how they were talking, what it felt like, and the nature of the sea air in the garden.”

At family dinners with his mum, dad, sister and brother, when the gravy boat is passed around, he is transported back to childhood meals. “I can see my dad watching it thinking ‘don’t pour too much’, because my mum never made enough gravy… The memory would be a feeling – the tension, the excitement, but also the atmosphere of late 1970s Nottingham.”

Reliving food memories with his family is particularly important for Ed, whose mum has dementia and has been in a home for three years. “It’s important for my dad that we all go to visit… and have lunch together. My dad would want me to cook the kind of thing my mum would have cooked 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. That allows us together to remember all the times we had with her during the period when she didn’t have dementia,” he says.

The art of bringing back memories through food

Taking photos of food you’ve ordered in restaurants has become commonplace, but when Ed created a cookbook of family recipes for his eldest daughter to take to university, he didn’t have phone snaps of dishes or a diary to fall back on. His wife, MP Yvette Cooper, suggested he created it as a photo book, and when he looked through family pics he found food was often at the heart of them. “We weren’t taking photos of the food, we were taking photos of the family in that situation, when the kids were a certain age or in a certain place, and you look at the middle of it and, of course, there is often the recipe I am now replicating. The food provides that bridging role.”

For anyone wanting to revisit and share their memories through food, Ed advises it needs a bit of thought. When writing his recently published memoir Appetite, he says, “First of all, I thought about the period I was writing about, like early memories, or growing up in the ’70s, or having the first kiss, and then I thought, is this the recipe that is most evocative of it?”

He acknowledges not everyone will have the same memory of a dish. “There’s a picture of [my eldest daughter] eating shepherd’s pie with us 10 years ago, but actually my earliest memory of shepherd’s pie was going to my grandma’s house in Norwich in the ’70s. For me, the most important thing would be being five… but in a book for my daughter it would be cooking it for her.”

Food is at the centre of family life

Food’s place at the centre of social occasions is one reason why it can trigger a wider memory, Ed finds. Family gatherings, holidays and celebrations often come with a helping of memorable dishes. And equally, he suggests its power to trigger memories may also be “partly why it is so powerful as a way of bringing people together”.

The way we cook changes as we age, often depending on what’s happening elsewhere in our lives. “There’s periods of consolidation, periods of learning and periods of experimentation,” says Ed. He started experimenting with cooking when he bought his first flat. But his dad started [cooking] a couple of years ago, making cheese straws and mince pies to take to his mum in the care home. “The fact that my dad would become experimental in his 80s, that wasn’t expected,” he says. “[He] sent me a WhatsApp recipe of a vegan apple and blackberry crumble [he’d made]. Vegan! I couldn’t believe it… Partly because I’ve been doing this book and asking him about memories of food, he started cooking some of the stuff, and then he got a bit inventive. Five years ago, he never would have made an apple and blackberry crumble – but vegan!”

How food can influence relationships

The food we choose to eat and how we eat it can be more than a sideline at any gathering, whether it’s family, business or politics, according to Ed. “In many situations the providing of food and the hospitality says something about welcoming, showing respect and being willing to receive as well as give.” When filming in Rochdale for an upcoming BBC documentary about social care Ed Balls: Care in Crisis, the crew ate with the Imam and members of the Rochdale Asian community they had been filming with that day. “It was incredibly important to them that we ate with them and that they provided it because we were guests.” This is the case in many different social situations, he says: “The providing of food and eating it together is a big deal at the G7 summit of world leaders… or if you’re meeting a partner’s parents for the first time.”

But “in politics, food is very rarely about food,” he remarks in Appetite. At the meal at the Granita restaurant in Islington in 1994, at which then shadow chancellor Gordon Brown is said to have agreed to stand aside for then shadow home secretary Tony Blair in the Labour Party leadership contest, he reveals in the book that Gordon asked him, “What exactly is polenta?”

“Gordon Brown not knowing what polenta was and Tony Blair wanting to go to a Mediterranean restaurant on Upper Street – of course that has very many dimensions to it, about who’s choosing the restaurant, where it’s happening, where they’ve come from as people, the kind of lives they live, how they want to live, how they want to be seen. That’s just not the kind of place Gordon would ever have been to, go to, or want to be seen going to. He’s just not like that.”

Ed Balls lost his seat as an MP in the 2015 general election. A year earlier, Labour leader Ed Miliband was photographed ‘struggling’ to eat a bacon sandwich, an image which the Sun newspaper printed alongside the headline ‘Save our bacon’ the day before the election. Although Miliband later said, “I don’t think I lost because of a bacon sandwich,” he nevertheless warned, “Don’t eat on camera.”

Mixing food and politics can certainly come to a sticky end. Ed Balls has a view: “Bacon and eggs would be fine on a plate, if you use a knife and fork, but any time you eat a sandwich the photo can be shown in a nice way, or it can be shown like you’re being eaten by the sandwich, which is what happened to Ed Miliband.” In fact there are quite a lot of things you should never eat on camera as a politician, he warns, with spaghetti Bolognese and pizza off limits. “Can you imagine being a politician and eating a noodle soup? It’s a catastrophe, it’s impossible!”

This article was first published on 23 September 2021.