Comfort food

Comfort food is food that provides the eater a nostalgic or sentimental value and may be characterized by its satisfying heartiness and association with childhood or home cooking. The nostalgia may be specific to an individual or it may apply to a specific culture.

Definition and history

The term comfort food can be traced back at least to 1615, where in the beginning of the second part of Don Quixote, at the beginning of chapter one, Quixote's niece and her nurse are told to pamper him, "to give him things to eat which are comforting and appropriate for the heart and the brain ..." . Others trace it back to 1966, when the Palm Beach Post used it in a story: "Adults, when under severe emotional stress, turn to what could be called 'comfort food'—food associated with the security of childhood, like mother's poached egg or famous chicken soup." According to research by April White at JSTOR, it might have been Liza Minnelli who used the term for the first time in its modern meaning in an interview, admitting to craving a hamburger.

When the term first appeared, newspapers used it in quotation marks. In the 1970s, the most popular comfort food in the United States were various potato dishes and chicken soup, but even at the time, the definition varied from person to person. During the next decades, the nature of comfort food changed in the US, shifting from savory dishes to sweet ones, while comfort food themed cookbooks started to spread and restaurants started to offer items labelled as such, when originally the term was used for food items consumed "home alone". Worldwide diet trends emerging in the 1990s, like the low fat or the low-carb diet, were unable to end the cravings for comfort food. According to White, the COVID-19 pandemic that hit the world in 2020 further strengthened people's need for comfort food that evokes nostalgia and the feeling of belonging.

Psychological studies

Consuming energy-dense, high calorie, high fat, salt or sugar foods, such as ice cream or french fries, may trigger the reward system in the human brain, which gives a distinctive pleasure or temporary sense of emotional elevation and relaxation.