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Food and Foodways
Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment
Volume 13, 2005 - Issue 4
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Original Articles

Comfort Foods: An Exploratory Journey Into The Social and Emotional Significance of Food

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Pages 273-297 | Published online: 21 Aug 2006
 

This paper uses symbolic interactionist and structuralist perspectives to examine the social construction of some food objects as “comfort foods,” highlighting how cultural studies of food should take into account its social and physiological dimensions. This study's empirical findings are based upon the food items brought to class by 264 undergraduate students at a southeastern university in the United States. Comfort foods are classified into four categories: nostalgic foods, indulgence foods, convenience foods, and physical comfort foods. We describe how particular food objects come to be associated with the relief of distress and show how food objects are manipulated to modify or change emotional states or feelings. The practical implications of this work extend to understanding the role that mood plays in food selection and considering the use of comfort foods under certain circumstances, such as when individuals are experiencing illness.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank David Karp, Jon Darling, and Bill Cockerham for their insightful and thoughtful comments, which considerably improved this manuscript.

This work was supported by a career development award to the first author from the National Institutes of Health (K01 AG0094-01A2).

Notes

1. College and university instructors are increasingly using food as an instructional strategy within the classroom. At the joint annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society held in 1995, members of a panel discussion on “Why Food? How Do We Justify Food Studies?” presented by Belasco and his colleagues described having potlucks or eating together as a class as a way to teach students different aspects about society and culture (1995). Similarly, Wunsch, a fiction writer and memoirist, who teaches English at Queensborough Community College, requires students to “bring in a food that has been significant to their lives” for their final class assignment (1999). In doing so, she teaches her students to use food and eating experiences from the past to construct individual biographies. William Garry, a former editor of Bon Appetit, allowed his students to write on the topic of food in his journalism classes (1999). At Tufts University, the Dean of the College of Engineering, Ioannis Miaoulis, uses cooking to demonstrate key scientific concepts as they occur in one's daily life, such as thermodynamics of water (boiling an egg), heat conduction (baking a meat loaf), and radiation (broiling a fish).

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