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Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectator's Food and Drink Podcast. I'm Narra Prendergast.

And I'm Olivia Potts. And today we're delighted to be joined by Professor Charles Spence.

Professor Spence is an experimental psychologist and gastrophysicist at the University of Oxford.

He is the head of the Cross-Modal Research Group, which specialises in the research about the integration of information across different sensory modalities.

Professor Charles Spence, welcome to Table Talk. Thank you. Professor Sampson. about the integration of information across different sensory modalities.

Professor Charles Spence, welcome to Table Talk.

Thank you.

Professor Spence, we're going to start where we always do at the beginning and ask you,

what are your earliest memories of food?

So, one of the first memories, probably about my fourth birthday party, I think.

I'm around at that outdoor swimming pool with a bunch of my guests and a very big bowl of smarties.

And the game was whoever could get the biggest number of smarties in their hands, got to eat

a lot.

And it was Mr. Benson, who beat me.

I had the second biggest hands of all my colleagues.

So I never got to eat there. That was about food, even if I never got to actually eat.

Benefit. And it was my birthday, too. So.

And what were meal times like when you were growing up?

Both fraught on the one hand, I suppose, but also fun on the other,

fraught in the sense that I had a sort of traditional family with my elder brother and

sister who would always, we'd all be forced by our parents to eat all the vegetables of our

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