Day 16 - Comfort Food

In my first post, I talked about food making people, “feel comfortable and good.” I now understand that more than ever.

This sort of “emotional connection to food” is buried pretty deep inside of us. Think about all the foods you associate with good experiences: cake and ice cream at a party, Champaign at a wedding, popcorn at a movie, hot dogs at the ball park, those deep-fried cake dough and sugar abominations they always sell at carnivals… There’s some sort of universal experience, zeitgeist thing going on with these foods.

Now think about foods you associate with bad times: about all I can come up with is the taste of whiskey, which is probably more of a personal issue than a universal truth.

Whatever your “good and bad foods” list ends up looking like, I’m willing to bet the good is larger than the bad. I guess my point is that food goes pretty far beyond just staying alive. I’m eating plenty of food to just stay alive this month, but I’m not getting any “comfortable and good” vibes from this food, and I miss that.