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Sabroso - Winter2008
FEATURE FOOD ARTICLE
By Jeff Becker
Photography by Jesse Ramirez
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Here’s the story. It’s about you. And your mouth and your belly. And this nasty wind that is blowing
right through your jacket. Boy, look at that. It hurts to breathe, doesn’t it? Your fingers ache, your ears are numb and your lungs might as well be two frozen water balloons. Of course, you can see your breath, dancing around your face. If your car had started, you wouldn’t be here. Of course, if you made more money (there are a lot of “ifs” in your life now, aren’t there?) you could afford a car that started, regularly, but guess what, you don’t.
“Cold out there,” you say, to no one (for no one else is unlucky enough to be outside in this). “Cold, cold, cold.” Now, a light rain. You’ve had the kind of day that makes you, a grown person, feel like crying. The trees have long since shed their leaves and as you round that last bend into your driveway they stand naked before you, pointing at the sky, taunting you with their unraked debris.
Your story ends with a sigh. You are standing in your kitchen. The heater clicks on above you. Tonight your diet can go to H, E, double hockey sticks. Your hair is dripping wet and a great hunger has grown inside of you. You order out, you scrape through your pantry, you call your mother until it is here—that perfect food, the kind you grew up eating, the dish that told you who you were. When it is cold outside, when your life is hard and your heart is broken and all you can hope for is one little bite of warmth, you crave food. You want to sip green chile stew, tomato soup, hot cocoa, whatever it may be, or nibble some warm and creamy macaroni and cheese or fried chicken. For a second that nastiness melts away. Smell that red chile? It is perfect and the feeling seems to find some place deep inside you that had gone cold and makes it warm again. Your nose starts running. You had a rough go of it. You ate. Now, you feel better.
Food is our comfort.
Everyone eats. But not for the same reasons. Apart from sustenance, humans take a very personal approach to their food. Rituals erupt around our cuisines that are not found in our other daily practices. Few take such pride in driving home from work, brushing their teeth, or ironing our clothes and certainly our mouths never water when we think about them. To our fellows in the animal kingdom—the cow chewing its cud, the owl catching the mouse—food is fuel. But when humans eat, we eat with passion, and we eat for many reasons beyond merely filling up. We crave. We gather. We dine. We eat to celebrate and to mourn. We eat to greet new people and to say goodbye to old friends; we eat alone at times, to remember all those that we have dined with before, we eat too for the memories that come attached to our food. We eat for comfort.
Yet, what we eat is determined by a series of emotional, cultural and physiological decisions. According to Mindless Eating by Cornell University professor Brian Wansink, humans make roughly 250 decisions a day in connection to their food, few of which are made consciously. What, how much, and when they eat is determined by a large number of external factors—apart from hunger—like, according to Wansink, “family and friends, packages and plates, names and numbers, labels and lights, colors and candles, shapes and smells, distractions and distances, cupboards and containers.” For the most part, much of what and how we eat is determined by the culture and society we live in. This tells us what is acceptable and unacceptable to eat—for example dogs, horses, snails, and a host of animals we would never consider eating are delicacies in other parts of the world.
Food, in many ways, defines cultures and vice versa and comfort foods in particular help to tell us who we are. Every culture has its comfort foods. The French may crave snails (they consume 35,000 tons of them annually) bathed in butter in garlic while the Germans taste for beer and sausage runs amuck. Ramen noodles inspire such lust in Japan that they can be bought from vending machines. In the South African kingdom of Lesotho, during a very special feast of a cooked sheep’s head, the eyeballs reserved for the head of the household.
Here in the United States we enjoy just about everything (except, maybe, for eyeballs)—and our comfort foods cross both cultural and geographical borders. It is not uncommon for a young man to feel the need for both sushi and red chile enchiladas in the same week. Luckily for us, we live in a world that can satisfy those cravings with one swipe of the debit card.
Across cultures, however, comfort foods have a few things in common. For one, according to Science Creative Quarterly, comfort foods are typically made with a lot of fat, sugar and carbohydrates (or all three, like donuts). For a number of reasons, our taste buds find fat more appealing, and when we eat it the chemicals that cause feelings of comfort and pleasure are released. From an evolutionary standpoint, our bodies are hardwired to seek out high-energy foods. Back when there were still animals that ate us, we needed these foods to keep us moving, fighting and living, and the chemical processes that govern our nervous system reward us for eating foods that do just this.
But comfort foods are specific beyond culture—often one does not crave tamales, he craves his Mom’s tamales, made with the black olives in them. In winter, perhaps, this need is more pronounced. We are trapped by cold weather in our homes, with our families and our appetites. The ring goes out for macaroni and cheese, for soup, for pot roast. As the weather turns we yearn for tamales, red chile and casserole. Eat, my friends, it is what you were made to do. Our bodies love us for it. And it feels good. Like a mug of something warm on a cold winter’s day.
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