I read this article recently on studies done on comfort food to determine whether it's actually a thing, whether food helps improve our moods or not. While I'm all for science dispelling myths that lead us to poor decisions like, in this case, overeating or eating foods that aren't good for us, the studies were problematic.
The attempt to induce the need for comfort food in the highlighted study involved having a group of people watch clips from sad movies. How do you get a group to decide on what is actually sad for everyone? Movies aren’t real life anyway, so unless you relate heavily to what’s going on in the story or you have a memory around your first viewing of a particular film, you may not get emotional at all.
The researchers concluded that following sad movie clips with food didn’t really have any effect on the participants of the study. Their moods didn’t change whether they ate their chosen comfort foods or didn’t eat at all. Given that some of the participants may not have felt down or in need of comfort to begin with, it’s no wonder. At the very least, the studies weren’t done in the context of individual lives and actions.
I say, to each his or her own melancholy-inducing situations and his or her own version of comfort when needed.
To illustrate, I offer up a short and appropriately Thanksgivingy tale of a comfort food episode I experienced many years ago that convinced me that sometimes comfort food works—in context:
It snowed heavily that year, so I was unable to make the trip to my family gathering for the Thanksgiving holiday, which usually would have been just fine by me because I've never fit in well with the family I grew up with, and we didn't especially have barrels of fun when we were together—we still don't. I welcome excuses to decline invites.
This photo from a couple of years ago is here to help set the mood. Read on
But that year was different because instead of getting together with friends for a "Thanksgiving Refugee Party" as we called our holiday potlucks, I was on my own. In the couple of years leading up to this particular holiday weekend, my friends had started pairing up and producing offspring. The last friend who lived nearby had popped out a kid that summer.
Annoying parents who had been avoided over the holidays by their young adult children had become adoring grandparents and were being welcomed back into the lives of my friends because it was worth putting up with family drama to finally gain parental approval by simply having a baby. I had been invited to be a part of a friend’s family dinner, but my friend had been replaced by an alien who fed on all of that baby/grandma goo and created an environment that I seriously could not relax in.
So I sat alone on my couch that Thanksgiving watching it snow and trying unsuccessfully to read. I was feeling sorry for myself even though I prefer my own company and had convinced myself that I was better off than my up-to-their-armpits-in-diapers friends and their stupid, syrupy little Norman Rockwell scenes.
I'm not sure why, but after a while, I developed a craving for a bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar. I wasn’t especially hungry. When my mood is off, I lose my appetite. Maybe, on some deep, dark level, I was missing my family home. I grew up eating oatmeal every morning before school. Every damn morning.|
To be fair though, there was some variety to the bowls we faced in on daily basis. Some mornings my mom forgot to add salt to the oats, and since we were used to having the grain salted, it tasted awful. Sometimes she burned it and we had to eat it (damn well better) anyway. On a really good day, she forgot to salt it and she burned it. It might be lumpy or really, really runny. In times of financial stress, we ate it with fake (powdered) milk. So many combos of those variations that we had to pipe down and get busy eating so we didn’t miss the damn school bus and make our parents late for work (I could do another diary on those studies about sitting down together as a family at meal times…)
Then there were those rare (so very rare) mornings--when we were running on time, and my mother was in good mood, or she had to leave for work before we headed out to catch the bus, and we were left to our own devices--that we got brown sugar on top of our glop.
Just imagine a frosty day when the parent in charge is acting all happy or isn’t around, and the oatmeal, cooked to a perfect consistency, is not only salted, but is unburned and served with real milk and topped with brown sugar that is slowly melting through the grain to form a sweet pool at the bottom of the bowl (unless you are like my brother who skimmed it off the top and reached for more). For a few moments, I could forget about the walk to the bus stop and the school day ahead. And for just a little while, my brothers would be distracted enough to stop picking on me. A sort of bliss, I guess.
Oatmeal with brown sugar is not very photogenic, but you probably need the visual break from the text, so here you go. Read on.
So on that snowy Thanksgiving Day when I couldn’t get home or stomach being with my friends, I made myself a bowl of oatmeal, which I cooked to a perfect consistency, added real milk to, and topped with brown sugar. Then I snuggled back down on my couch to enjoy the porridge and the snow. And I started to feel better. Much better. Once it got too dark to see out the window, I lost myself in my book.
Granted, maybe I had become a little chilled sitting there by the window, and the action of getting up to make the oatmeal warmed me up. Or maybe, because it was late in the day, my blood sugar was down and eating fixed that. Or perhaps I simply needed to distract myself for a few minutes to break out of my downer of a thought pattern.
In the end it didn’t matter. I found a bright spot in my childhood memories that I associated with food and, unconsciously, I went for it. My outlook was brightened. In that moment, the oatmeal (or the actions I took to get it) was just the right type of comfort food to take care of my melancholy-inducing situation.
At least one researcher came to the same conclusion I did about context:
“…the researchers didn't look at the real-life contexts in which people eat comfort foods. "Maybe the comfort from comfort food comes from going to a cafe acquiring it," Mann says. The research on the psychological effects of comfort food is fairly scant, she notes, so we don't have any definite answers yet.”
Source: NPR
More research is obviously needed. We can gather some data right here and now. I was going to do a comfort food poll, but I can’t possibly cover all the bases, so you can share your story in the comments.
P.S. I have since had my own family and now understand all the baby goo, but struggle with the grandma stuff. I still avoid gatherings with my childhood family. The family I created is so much more fun.
P.P.S Oatmeal hasn’t had this effect on me since. I really think you have to take comfort food on a case-by-case basis and be honest about how what you eat makes you feel.