Marcia Pelchat passes out yellow, brown and black jelly beans to a roomful of "foodies" at St Antony's College, Oxford University, on a recent Saturday morning. Closing our eyes, we are asked to select a bean, pinch our nostrils together and take a taste. Can anyone identify the flavour of their bean? No. Now, unpinch the nostrils and try again. Depending on our choices, the flavours of banana, chocolate or liquorice come through loud and clear.
Next, identical white plastic squeeze bottles are circulated around the room. We're told to sniff and record the aromas we detect. Curry powder? Chocolate? Petrol? Sheepishly comparing answers, we note that where the majority of sniffers perceived cinnamon in bottle number four, one person detected cat food and another, furniture polish. Many had trouble identifying any of the scents emanating from the bottles.
Illuminating the taste-smell link, Dr Pelchat, a biochemist with the Monnell Institute of Chemical Senses in Philadelphia, notes that olfaction is also associated with the area of the brain responsible for emotions and memory. Thus, she explains, it is not so strange that there are strong emotional connotations to what we smell.
Indeed, across the hall Rose Arnold discusses the psychological and philosophical importance of the memory-triggered food imagery in Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, while over the grassy quadrangle Stephen Massil offers a nostalgic take on taste memories from early childhood.
Welcome to the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, where some 200 anthropologists, sociologists, cookbook authors, food writers and anyone else with a serious interest in food are gathered to discuss the theme Food and Memory. It's a predominantly British and American group, with a smattering of Asians, Africans, Australians and South Americans.
Over the next two days, we will hear 20 lectures, chosen from the conference menu of about 50 presentations. Subjects include Socratic banquets; memories of POWs; memory as a culinary skill; debunking false culinary memories; and edible literacy. Most will be delivered in the form of a lecture followed by discussion, but at Oxford anything goes.
One year, a contributor accompanied her talk on gefilte fish with Yiddish folksongs performed by a local singer. We will also consume untold cups of tea and coffee; eat a lot of food; drink a lot of wine; gossip, share information, and - in-between sessions, if there is time - soak up Oxford's rarefied air of lofty scholarship.
The symposia were founded in 1979 by Alan Davidson (76), a former British Ambassador to Laos and the author of numerous food books including The Oxford Companion to Food. With the help of Dr Theodore Zeldin, a historian on France at St Antony's College, the fledgling seminars grew into a full-scale conference in 1981. The principle, according to Davidson, was to provide a forum for researchers in the newly emerging field of food history - an area that bridges anthropology, cultural history, politics, aesthetics and science, and is only recently gaining credence in academic circles.
In true democratic fashion, symposiasts would be free to deliver papers on any aspect of the forum's designated theme, chosen by symposiasts themselves two years in advance of each meeting. (The topics for the next two years are The Meal, and Fat.) Papers would be circulated prior to the conference; they would be published in a continuing series of "proceedings" to be used as resource materials for researchers.
Perhaps most radical, then and now, was the edict that anyone who wished would be admitted to the symposia.
"I particularly welcome people who have no credentials," says the Derry-born Davidson, an engaging man with a grey "pageboy" hairdo, a penchant for wearing purple, burgundy and acid-green clothing, loud tropical hats, strings around his wrists, and an ever-present "long life" Buddhist medallion necklace. "The voices of common sense and practical experience should be heard."
As such, Oxford's open-mindedness fosters a kind of "potluck" environment, in which eminent scholars mingle with housewives, symposiasts drift from one session to the next without causing offence, and every paper is accorded respect, no matter how bizarre its contents.
"I applaud Alan's amazingly catholic taste which truly encourages fresh thinking," says Barbara Ketchum Wheaton, whose seminal work about French cooking, Savouring the Past, has been translated into French.
One of the cardinal rules at Oxford is to mix with your fellows. Saturday night's dinner - this year an elaborate Roman Feast adapted from the recipes of Apicius and Cato, and served at long tables - is a perfect opportunity. I meet Gwen Barclay, a commercial herb grower from Texas, who happens to be researching Irish food customs. Do I know about Irish wake food? (Anyone who has information about what sorts of food/drink are, or were, served at wakes is invited to e-mail Gwen at hill.barclay@juno.com.)
Opposite me are two sisters from the Philippines, one of whom is a graduate student at Oxford, the other a passionate home cook. We debate the merits and demerits of the meal - the Mensa Prima of roast wild boar with a roasted pine nut and black cumin sauce doesn't taste wild and is kind of a bore, but we really like the Mensa Secunda, a compote of peaches in a honey and wine sauce with caraway. There are some memorable fashion statements being made. A woman at my table wears a papiermache saucer hat rakishly on her forehead, while across the room some of the conference's "elders" drape faux ivy wreaths around their heads.
There's a small Irish presence at the symposium. For many years, Myrtle Allen of Ballymaloe House was a mainstay. Regina Sexton, who teaches at University College, Cork and wrote A Little History of Irish Food, is usually in attendance. This year, Martin Mac Con Iomaire and Elizabeth Erraught, faculty members at the Dublin Institute of Technology, are here to seek input on improving DIT's new, four-year degree programme in culinary arts. With the emergence of food history as a legitimate discipline, they are hoping to build their library into Ireland's premier resource for food historians.
There are always a few messages that resonate at any conference. Here at Oxford, the idea of looking at the past to understand the present was implicit. In Zona Spray's profusely illustrated "Memories of a Vanishing Eskimo Culture," we are shown just how quickly a centuries-old model of subsistence cooking can be swallowed by a "fast food" culture.
And in former New York Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton's talk about the bialy - a "tough yeasty little bun" that emigrated with Jewish residents of Bialystok, Poland, before and during the Holocaust - we learn the power of resilience. Foods, like their eaters, have ways of surviving the most unlikely circumstances.
For more information about the Oxford Symposium, contact the organiser, Jane Levi at 101 Millennium Tower, 65 Hopton St, London SE1 9JL. E-mail: foodsymp@banksider.demon.co.uk