1 . Turkey is not my thing, but one dish I cannot live without on Thanksgiving is my mom’s Snowy Mashed Potatoes. I start________these potatoes, my annual time release capsule of pure joy in early November. I’m pretty sure I’ve had them at every Thanksgiving since I was a kid, and bites often transport me back to different years and different dining rooms.

How and why is it that certain foods give us so much________ ? And what can be said about the kinds of foods we consider most comforting? Science tells us that taste and nutritional content affect how foods make us feel, but certain foods are especially________ satisfying for reasons that have little to do with their taste or nutritional content. Much of the happiness we get from our favorite foods comes from the memories they stimulate for us and the people we’re with while we________them. Past and present________shape the foods we find comforting.

Often, we love food because we have________ memories associated with it. My mom’s mashed potatoes (土豆泥) remind me of holiday joy and past reunions with extended family. We are also drawn to foods we were given early in life by people who cared for us, which can help explain our________ love for chicken noodle soup, which many parents feed their sick children to make them feel better.

The smell of food can________powerful memories, too. The part of the brain responsible for processing smell directly connects to the amygdala, a brain region that processes emotions, and the hippocampus, which handles memory. And our memory for smells is________and precise, especially when it comes to smell we were first exposed to in childhood. That’s why you might catch the smell of pumpkin pie baking in the oven and be transported back to the first tine you baked it with your grandmother.

These________can go the other way, too. Sometimes you might feel________when you eat foods that remind you of loved ones you miss. We may also________foods that we associate with bad experiences.

In addition to past memories, the________in which we eat foods shapes how much we enjoy them in the moment, and our gustatory (味觉的) experiences can be________by a sense of community, a sense of warmth and enjoying it together.I________my mom’s Snowy Mashed Potatoes that much more today because I got to eat them with my husband and two children, the three people I love most in the world.