It’s easy to import undue gravity onto a situation. So take it with a grain of salt when I say I was heartbroken.
Heartbreak is a strong word for the sting of an unrequited crush. It’s a bummer, for sure, but it’s not lie-on-the-floor-clutching-a-pillow-grieving-a-future-that-will-never-be heartbreak. Or at least it shouldn’t be. Heartbreak or no, a girl’s gotta eat. The question is then, what food will best comfort my bruised heart?
There are several factors to consider when academically defining comfort food. As Charles Spence starts in Comfort food: A review “The term comfort food refers to those foods whose consumption provides consolation or a feeling of well-being. Foods, in other words, that offer some sort of psychological, specifically emotional, comfort.” Megan T. Soffin and W. Robert Batsell Jr. later refined Spence’s work in their study, Towards a situational taxonomy of Comfort Foods: A retrospective analysis by surveying individuals on their comfort foods. Soffin and Batsell based their work on Spence’s definition and broke it down into five key categories of why individuals gravitate towards food for comfort. They called these variables: tasty, emotion, nostalgia, unhealthy, and preparation.
In turn I have surveyed 28 individuals asking about finding comfort in food after an upsetting life experience, requesting special emphasis on the flavors that stuck out.
The term tasty here refers to picking a comfort food based on enjoyment of the taste/flavor. Or more clearly, individuals finding comfort in foods that taste good to them. This is the media’s portrayal of comfort food, saturated in sweetness. TV and movies present the meal of heartbreak as chocolate and ice cream straight from the carton. See Elle Woods in Legally Blonde decrying love, despondently picking her way through a box of truffles.
The night of my heartbreak, I followed Elle’s lead and I sunk my spoon into the endless abyss of canned chocolate frosting to coat my sorrows. Spoonful by spoonful bemoaning my certain fate of emotional and literal spinsterhood. At first, the excess was comforting. Eating right out of the can broke every rule I was warned about as a child. I found that rebellion exhilarating. If I had nothing else, Betty Crocker’s rich and creamy sugar corn syrup mixture seemed to never run out. Yum.
Most respondents to my survey referenced foods that tasted good to them. One denoted their enjoyment plainly,
“Recently coped by making myself a grilled cheese and tomato soup. Sweet acidity of the soup with the buttery, savory sandwich?? Plus I put some garlic powder on the grilled cheese, it banged.”
It can be tempting when finding a comfort food that bangs like grilled cheese to have it over and over again. Soffin and Batsell found that if “the consumer is in a negative state… and then engages in consuming a specific food that will reduce or eliminate that negative state… it is likely that the food will be an effective comfort food in the future.”
One of my respondents noted how they purposefully repeat snacks when looking for comfort.
“When I’m feeling stressed or overwhelmed for a while, and then I’m given the opportunity to relax a bit, I often turn to food for comfort. Not making a meal or anything– more like aggressive snacking. The same food over and over and over again, the same flavor, is kind of comforting when other things feel out of control.”
So it makes sense to see rom-com heroines indulge in pint after pint of ice cream. But sugary repetition can only do so much, even Elle ultimately throws her box at the screen. And despite its yum factor, I will not be going back to frosting.
The sweetness stung with regret, not clarity. Creamy to the point of texturelessness, it lingered, a dull ache behind my teeth, keeping my thoughts stuck, stagnant in self pity. Eat enough spoonfuls and the association stops being a sugary hit of amusing dopamine. A half empty can of frosting is never half-full, because I know exactly where the rest of it went. Now the smell of self-preserving birthdays is a gross reminder of my melodrama. Betty Crocker would not be proud.
I went to sleep unsolved, stomach heavy, feeling sluggish and sad. Frosting was not my answer. I needed another comfort food to help deal with my emotions.
When defining why people turn to food for comfort, managing emotion is a core aspect. Spence posits that eating can be to satisfy an emotion rather than just physical hunger. In my survey respondents mentioned turning to comfort food to deal with emotions such as stress, illness, sadness, heartbreak, surprise by sudden change, anxiety, discomfort, exhaustion, and defeat. One respondent shared how their mother helped comfort them after a breakup with sweet food.
“When my summer camp gf broke up with me…I was devastated. We only dated for two weeks, but she was beautiful and funny and a great musician and treated me very well before the breakup. I just remember how jarring it was that we didn’t get to even try to test our relationship in the real world, and that I didn’t have the chance to continue showing her all of the love and appreciation I had for her. My mum took me to a patisserie… and got me strawberry mousse for breakfast, and pet my hair while I cried and replayed every moment of this girl in my head. There was a tangy, jammy layer and a creamy layer. The food was rich but I still remember feeling like I had room for a big, milky coffee… I just think my mum was such a real one for getting me pudding for breakfast. She knows exactly what a broken heart needs.”
Heartbreak is a multifaceted emotion, and while sweetness might help quell sadness, another one of the stages of heartbreak is anger. To me, anger tastes like orange juice. There’s nothing refreshing about OJ, no matter how perfectly chilled, no matter how few minutes ago that juice was once in a whole fruit. At worst it’s chalky and bitter. At best it’s still just orange juice. Something about the back of the tongue acid, muted by sugar makes my blood boil. In the face of rage, I chugged two bottles of the stuff. Later, concerned parties inquired if there was any alcohol involved. No, it was just orange juice. And I hated it.
I smashed the bottles on the sidewalk, shards flying into the snowy grass. A feat of determined grit, since plastic bottles do not shatter naturally. My hands cracked from the cold as I used my phone flashlight to find the remaining pieces. I may be unlovable, but I won’t litter.
Orange juice may seem like an unconventional choice for comfort, especially when I detest it so. The heapings of frosting with all its sugar-y unhealthy goodness should have been enough. But researchers warn about mistakenly conflating tasty and unhealthy, as Shia Gbriel told the Atlantic in 2015 “to equate ‘comfort food’ with ‘caloric’ is to misunderstand where the comfort actually comes from.”
The comfort I found in my dislike of orange juice was the familairy of its gross-ness. I knew what it would taste like from all the times I’d had orange juice as a kid, thinking that maybe this time I would like it. The nostalgia of disappointment was familiar.
Nostalgia is a key ingredient in which foods comfort. In my survey, respondents referenced foods that reminded them of childhood.
“When I think of comfort in food, I think about the times when I was sick as a child and had to stay home from school. My mom would make me cinnamon sugar toast. It was one of the only things that I could eat, even when I was sick to my stomach. It’s one of those melt in your mouth, easy to chew and easy to love flavors. It was easily the best part of being sick.”
Nostalgia is a reminder of familiar times, so when things are unfamiliar people turn to comfort foods. In A taste of the unfamiliar. Understanding the meanings attached to food by international postgraduate students in England, Lorraine Brown, John Edwards, and Heather Hartwell study nostalgia and familiarity in eating habits of international students. This study used interviews with international students in England to identify roles of food and eating in their lives. Their findings highlighted the role of cultural significance in the familiar flavors of individuals comfort. Brown, Ewards, and Hartwell’s subjects expressed that familiar flavors were comforting because it was a reminder of the safety of home,
“It seemed that in its familiarity, home country food could be reassuring, nurturing and stabilising, and was credited with alleviating stress and loneliness. Eating such food was capable of transporting students to a place and time when they felt safe. It cushioned them from the stress associated with a world that is not home.”
Familairy was important because the students were in an unfamiliar place,
“In the literature on culture shock, stress is usually shown to be a function of the perception of strangeness and of cultural distance. The loss of familiarity provokes anxiety, and the comfort brought by the maintenance or creation of ethnic ties, in this case, represented by food, is a powerful antidote.”
This study also touched on food and community. This idea of food and community as comfort is explored further in the study,
“Many interviewees revealed that eating familiar home country food was positively associated with feelings of comfort and reassurance. This is indicated in the recurrent juxtaposition of the words familiar, the same, home and expecting to describe food and happy, enjoy, satisfied, at ease and nice to refer to students’ emotional state.”
One of my respondents wrote about cooking comforting food with friends.
“I was super anxious the other day and went over to a friend’s place and they made soup with vegetables and chicken and lots of warm spices like ginger and turmeric. We also made arroz con leche which has lots of cinnamon in it. I think I find warming spices such as ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, etc, to be very comforting, especially during the colder months.”
While another wrote about paying more attention to the preparation of the food with other people,
“During COVID quarantine years, my family and I put a lot more attention into the meals we made and we tried to make different dishes than we were used to. The flavors were very fresh and stronger, or at least they seemed like that. We used a lot of produce from our own kitchen to make the dishes and I think that this made a stronger connection between us and the food making process.”
When the orange juice wore off, I floated, disconnected, in the sea of my own disappointment, aimless and untethered.
I was led to my next comfort food by my close friend, who had stood above me while I clutched my pillow, looked on as I gorged on frosting, stepped back while I shattered the oj bottle and then said, “Let’s try something else.” Something else came in glass, clad in yellow, topped with wood, shining red. At only 1000 (to 3600) Sscovilles, Cholula is not the hottest sauce on the market. It’s not even the hottest hot sauce I’ve ever tasted. (Summer 2022, on a dare from John, the cousin-in-law DaBomb Beyond Insanity – 135,600 Scovilles. Tastes and burns like battery acid. Could be battery acid.) But my darling, Cholula, is the yummiest. And it’s what my friend had on hand to help me center myself. Had I been alone, I would have simply poured a considerable amount of the sauce directly into my mouth, exponentially increasing my pathetic points. However, my dear friend along for the ride offered homemade bread as a medium. (Who says no to homemade bread?)
Holding back a sneeze tickled into existence by the spicy scent, I saturated my slice dripping red. Then popped the whole piece into my mouth at once. I held it there, letting the burn spread across my tongue. There was the spark I was looking for! It was hard to wallow in my head when my mouth burned so delightfully. It’s a scraped knee from playing, a reminder that gravity has not forgotten about you. It’s looking directly into the sunset to marvel. It’s a love bite. It burns. My friend and I laughed, and I felt a bit better.
I couldn’t find comfort in a single flavor, it was an array of sweet to spicy and the magic of friendship that soothed my not-quite broken heart. In the end, maybe I just needed a snack.
References:
- Brown, L., Edwards, J., & Hartwell, H. (2010). A taste of the unfamiliar. understanding the meanings attached to food by international postgraduate students in England. Appetite, 54(1), 202–207. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2009.11.001
- Romm, C. (2015, April 3). Why comfort food comforts. The Atlantic. Retrieved April 14, 2023, from https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/why-comfort-food-comforts/389613/
- Soffin, M. T., & Batsell, W. R. (2019). Towards a situational taxonomy of Comfort Foods: A retrospective analysis. Appetite, 137, 152–162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2019.02.018
- Spence, C. (2017). Comfort Food: A Review. International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science, 9, 105–109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijgfs.2017.07.001
About the author:
Hazel Feldstein is a third year sociology major at Oberlin College. She is also studying journalism and creative writing. Hazel’s favorite meal was a pickle from Busch Garden in the 5th grade.
