Every couple of years, when I’m in Asheville, North Carolina, I look forward to drinking good bourbon and eating shrimp and grits in a charming downtown restaurant called Tupelo Honey. It’s the only time I ever eat grits, as the cornmeal mush so popular in the American South has no appeal for me as a breakfast food. But those shrimp and grits are to die for. (The good bourbon likely enhances the experience.)

The same goes for the rich, succulent crab and asparagus bisque I eat only when my wife and I visit the popular Horsefeathers restaurant in North Conway, New Hampshire. My stepdaughter, also a fan of this creamy, rib-sticking, belly-filling soup, found the recipe online and made it at home, but everyone in the family agreed it just wasn’t the same as eating it in the rustic restaurant. (An ice-cold locally crafted beer takes it up a notch, too.)

Beignets and café au lait in New Orleans. Stone crabs in Miami. Skirt-steak tacos from a food truck in San Antonio. How ’bout a turkey club sandwich at the Maine Diner in Wells? Nothing special about that, right? But when eaten at the diner’s counter after a morning’s fishing, it’s ambrosial. (Just so you don’t think I drink too much, I like this one with black coffee.)

This should tell us something interesting about food and its consumption, about the deep psychological relationship between gastronomic pleasure and physical experience. Which brings to mind another “food event” my wife and I experienced.

It was New Year’s Eve, First Night in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And freezing cold. Bone-chilling, teeth-chattering, blood-thickening, jumping-up-and-down-to-stay-warm cold. We had been standing outside in a long line to attend some event (a concert, I think) and we simply couldn’t take it anymore. We broke ranks with our tougher-than-us friends and ran, desperately searching the town for indoor warmth. We landed in a basement bar and pizza joint.

Hands slowly thawing, ears no longer in danger of breaking off, we sat at the bar and ordered a large brick-oven pizza named for a former state governor. I’m not sure we even read the ingredients, just pointed to the menu and stammered, “Wa-wa-want th-th-that one!” Turns out, that funny-named pizza (plus a couple glasses of house red wine) was the best thing we’d ever tasted. At least it was the best pizza.

Had we eaten the same pie on a hot day in August, I’m sure we would have been less impressed. I was teaching a martial arts class twice a month in Portsmouth, so we ended up eating about a hundred of those pizzas. They never tasted as good as the first one, but damn near. Perhaps hurting yourself makes food taste better.

I suspect all these special-food experiences operate on the same basic principle that applies to hot dogs at baseball games and s’mores on camping trips – they just don’t taste as good anywhere else. That said, eggplant tastes bad whenever and wherever you eat it.