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Comfort Food Meanings and Memories
INTRODUCTION
Michael Owen Jones and Lucy M. Long In Comfort Food Meanings and Meals,
edited by Michael Owen Jones and Lucy M. Long.
Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2017.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “comfort food” is “food that
comforts or affords solace; hence, any food (freq. with a high sugar or carbohydrate
content) that is associated with childhood or with home cooking. orig. N. Amer.”
Merriam-Webster’s 10th ed. Collegiate Dictionary defines comfort food as fare “prepared
in a traditional style having a usually nostalgic or sentimental appeal,” while in the
Encyclopedia of Food and Culture (2002), Julie Locher notes that it is “any food
consumed by individuals, often during periods of stress, that evokes positive emotions
and is associated with significant social relationships.”
Typically linked home, tradition, nostalgia, and positive feelings, the phrase
“comfort food” appears to be an American invention that has begun to reach beyond U.S.
borders. Its first appearance in print may have been on Sunday November 6, 1966 in a
column by psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers titled “Psychological Problems Play a Part in
Obesity.” Published in The Des Moines Register and many other newspapers, the essay
states, “Studies indicate that most 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.” The OED, however, dates the
expression’s earliest use to an article in the Washington Post on December 25, 1977 in
which restaurant critic Phyllis Richman describes a Southern dish. In 2013, Richman
revisited the term, observing that she doubted that she created it, contending that the
phenomenon likely exists worldwide, and implying that although the specific foods might
differ for us individually, we seem to understand the phrase.
The term has become widely adopted into everyday speech, restaurant menus,
cooking shows, recipe books, magazines, and advertising. Recent years have seen a rapid
increase in popular interest in comfort food. Numerous cooking magazines have devoted
major sections and even entire issues to the subject. A number of recipe books have been
published, some of which provide lower calorie and more healthful versions of comfort
foods, from snacks to entrees and desserts. Restaurants attach the phrase to their menus,
and the food industry exploits it in marketing. Meanwhile, individuals seem to use the
notion as a way to both celebrate and justify eating certain foods that do not fit current
concepts of healthful or nutritious eating.
Surprisingly little research has been done on comfort food from a cultural
perspective. Medical sociologist Julie L. Locher may have first introduced it into food
studies scholarship in 2002 through her essay, “Comfort Food,” in the Encyclopedia of
Food and Culture, edited by Solomon Katz. She went on to publish a foundational article
in 2005 in the journal Food & Foodways, in which she and co-researchers drew from a
survey among students to identify four categories of comfort foods based on the needs
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they fulfill: nostalgia, indulgence, convenience, and physical satisfaction. Other
scholarship has come primarily from the fields of psychology, public health, and nutrition
and has focused on the motivations for partaking of comfort foods as well as the impact
of that consumption on the bodies of the consumers. As early as 1998, Paulette Wood and
Barbra D. Vogen published “Feeding the Anorectic Client: Comfort Foods and Happy
Hour” in Geriatric Nursing. Brian Wansink, Matthew Cheney, and Nina Chan later wrote
about comfort food preferences across age and gender in Physiology & Behavior,
concluding that “Comfort foods are foods whose consumption evokes a psychologically
comfortable and pleasurable state for a person” (2003). Carl T. Hall demonstrated that
comfort food helped to relieve stress, at least in rats that were given high-fat foods
(2003). Mary Dallman, Norman Pecoraro, and Susanne la Fleur as well as other scholars
have examined the relationship between chronic stress, comfort food and obesity which,
not surprisingly is a circular one, since most comfort foods tend to be high in fat,
carbohydrates, and sugar (2003, 2005). Obesity resulting from consuming comfort food
has continued to be a major concern among researchers. Robert D. Levitan and Caroline
Davis, for example, examine the issue in their article on “Emotions and Eating Behavior”
(2010).
The emphasis on gender differences has been a major thread in much of this
research. Dubé Jordan, L. LeBel, and Ji Lu found that negative emotions tended to trigger
comfort food consumption for women, but positive ones triggered it for men (2005).
Other researchers also focused on the motivations for consuming comfort foods. For
example, nutritionists Jayanthi Kandiah, Melissa Yake, James Jones, and Michaela Meyer
stated the conclusion of their research in the title of their article: “Stress Influences
Appetite and Comfort Food Preferences in College Women” (2006). Similarly, Janet
A.Tomiyama, Mary F. Dallman, and Elissa S. Epel claimed in the journal,
Psychoneuroendocrinology that “Comfort Food Is Comforting to Those Most Stressed:
Evidence of the Chronic Stress Response Network in High Stress Woman” (2011). Other
researchers have expanded the scholarship to examine additional functions of comfort
food. For instance, in an essay concerning the consumption of chicken soup in
Psychological Science (2011), Jordan Troisi and Shira Gabriel observed that comfort
food serves as a social surrogate, fulfilling a need to belong.
Speculations about comfort food have also been aired in news media and in
professional arenas related to the food industry. As early as 2001, food writer Bret Thorn
published “Seeking Comfort, Diners Indulge in Feel-Good Fare” in Nation's Restaurant
News. A 2009 essay in a marketing Internet forum summarizes findings from the Center
for Culinary Development on differences in comfort food preferences by age (Lukovitz
2009). In the May 25, 2012 issue of the New York Times, journalist Daniel E. Slotkin
asked “What’s Your Comfort Food?” pointing out that personal preferences and
definitions vary. Other popular writers and journalists have embraced the idea of comfort
foods as individualistic and culture-specific, seeing the psychological value of them but
also challenging the use of the concept as an excuse to indulge in foods deemed “guilty
pleasures.” For example, an essay in Health Psychology on “The myth of comfort food”
(December 2014) elicited much discussion and debate. Nora Gomez Torres wrote of
“Cubans Finding Comfort, Nostalgia in Russian Products” in the Nov. 14, 2014 Miami
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Herald, and in The Atlantic (April 3, 2015) Cari Romm summarizes research on the
efficacy of comfort food in “Why Comfort Food Comforts: A New Study Looks at the
Intersection of Taste, Nostalgia, and Loneliness.”
While this research offers a foundation for studying comfort food, it does not fully
explore the implications of this category of food experience. The idea initially appears to
be straightforward and self-explanatory—it is food that comforts. A closer examination,
however, raises numerous questions about the concept, the specific foods belonging to
this category, and the nature of food itself. After all, should not all food comfort in some
way? As is commonly recognized by scholars and the general public, food fulfills
multiple needs and functions beyond its most basic one of sustaining life. Not all of those
functions are identified as their own category of food, so why such a genre as comfort
food? Does it reflect concerns related to contemporary life in the western world,
characterized by its industrial food system, an ethos that attaches specific moralities to
eating, and a tendency towards nostalgia and romanticization of family, childhood, and
the past? What foods fit into the category and why, and what is the role of
commercialization and marketing in the rising popularity of the genre?
One question about comfort food is whether it is a universal concept or is
particular to modern, western societies. Food in general seems to act as a symbolic
system in every cultural group,1 but we do not have the data to know whether the idea of
a separate category of foods that specifically and primarily offer comfort exists
throughout the world. The very idea of food comforting may reflect the distance
modernity has created between us and our food as well as between individuals. The
modern world in general is one in which industrialization and capitalist economic
philosophy have created a very real physical as well as emotional distance between our
work and the things we use.2 We rarely see an entire process of creating something from
start to finish, causing, according to some scholars, a feeling of alienation. Similarly,
modernity means that our lives are frequently fragmented into disparate social spheres,
while the mobility associated with the freedom to explore new paths and new selves
oftentimes cuts us off from our roots and dilutes a sense of continuity with places or
people.3 Modernity in this critique creates a need for comfort, and food because of its
close association with personal relationships and identity, easily fulfills that function;
hence, a category of foods that comfort. Modernity, however, can also erase those
associations or enable them to be invented and manipulated for commercial or political
gain.
Furthermore, the contemporary industrial food system contains numerous links in
the chain between producers and consumers. Food in this system becomes a product that
is initially grown or raised, but then processed, packaged, marketed, distributed, and sold.
The producer rarely knows the consumer and vice versa, and food is transported from
place to place without recognition of its origins or the people who have handled it along
the way.4 That many individuals find this system discomforting is evident in the diversity
of current social movements surrounding the reconnection of consumer and producer and
the reinvestment of meaning to activities around food as well as to food itself. Cultivating
and cooking one’s own food are presented now as means to emotional and psychological
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wholeness, for society as well as for individuals.5 Food that comforts in this way can be
seen as crucial to survival. Globalization, in spreading western products and perspectives
throughout the world, may also have spread these conditions for needing comfort.6
The industrial food system also turns food into a commodity rather than a cultural
item recognized as having meaning and value outside its monetary worth. As such, it then
becomes an item to be manipulated for optimal sales. Identities and meanings may be
attached to it that are thought to appeal to customers, but are adapted to the whims of the
marketplace.7 Comfort food as a category seems to be undergoing such commodification,
and specific dishes are being highlighted and turned into icons of the genre. Macaroni
and cheese, for example, is now presented by restaurants, cookbooks, and cooking shows
as the quintessential American comfort food. While it does historically have a significant
place in the memories of many American childhoods, it is not universal among
Americans. Its reputation for giving comfort, however, has become a large part of the
marketing surrounding it, so that even those who do not have personal associations with
it now also identify it as a comfort food. The processes of commodification and
iconification manipulate the meanings of food, but also raise issues about who gets to
select what foods mean and what they represent. Such cultural politics can frequently be
seen in the foods that have been promoted as symbols of regions or ethnicities, such as
lobster for Maine, crawfish for Cajuns, grits and barbecue for the South, and so on.8
Another aspect of modernity is nostalgia, a looking back on the past with
wistfulness and affection. It is a longing for happier times, which might not actually have
been as happy as remembered.9 Food oftentimes plays a role in nostalgia, carrying or
evoking specific memories, not only of the food itself but also of the relationships and
contexts associated with it. French novelist Marcel Proust wrote eloquently of how the
taste of a Madeleine cookie evoked vivid memories of his childhood.10 Grandmothers’
and mothers’ cooking is not so much about the taste of the food as the feelings of security
and safety represented by it. Family tends to be idealized and romanticized through
nostalgia, rendering pleasant and warm memories. The reality, of course, can be very
different, and the idea of comfort food may demonstrate that.11 Individuals differ in the
dishes they consider comforting, and those differences reflect, in part, different family
experiences as well as different personalities.
Comfort food also seems to be complicated by morality. Saying that an item is
comfort food relieves the eater of being concerned with its nutritional or caloric qualities,
suggesting that those foods in other contexts should not be eaten. This implies a moral
system of “good” and “bad” foods or food experiences. How does morality get attached
to certain foods? Sidney Mintz points out that morality is sometimes tied to the self, to
one’s relationship to a religious system (purity) or ethical system or even sense of self,12
but at other times to the impact of one’s actions on the larger society (1996). These
moralities are culturally specific, not universal. In his groundbreaking study of the place
of sugar in Western Europe at the end of the 1600s, he traced the movement of sugar from
an exotic luxury to being considered a necessary part of everyone’s diet. He demonstrated
that sugar was invested with both types of morality by Europeans. It was tied directly to
slavery by abolishionists who recognized the connection of slavery to sugar production in
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the Caribbean and called for boycotting sugar, saying that consuming it was essentially
murder. Sugar itself also had morality attached to it. It was considered unhealthful for the
body in large quantities and “corrosive of the will” (1996: 71). However, it was also used
as a medicine; it was allowed by the church during fasting if it was taken to aid digestion
rather than for nourishment.
Mintz brings up another perspective on comfort food when he refers to the
asceticism and puritanism foundational to American culture that has long viewed
pleasure, especially physical and sensual ones, as immoral. Comfort food is frequently
perceived as dishes that give us pleasure. They tend to satisfy our appetites and our
tastebuds, both of which are suspect in the western moral universe. Comfort food,
however, is understood to satisfy deeper psychological and emotional needs, therefore
relieving consumers of the moral judgment assigned to eating purely for the pleasure of
it.
The anthology Comfort food Meanings and Memories explores the concept of
“comfort food” primarily within a western context. Examples are taken from Atlantic
Canadians, Indonesians, the English in Britain, and various ethnic, regional, and religious
populations as well as rural and urban residents in the U.S. It includes studies of
particular foods, ways in which they comfort or in some instances cause discomfort, and
how these foods produce such an effect. The foods they focus on range widely from
bologna to chocolate, sweet and savory puddings, fried bread with an egg in the center,
dairy products, fried rice, cafeteria fare, sugary fried dough, soul food, and others. Some
essays analyze the phenomenon in daily life; others consider comfort food in the context
of cookbooks, films, Internet blogs, literature, marketing, and tourism. Recognizing that
what heartens one person might discomfort another, the collection includes essays on
comfort foods that are problematic in some way and is organized accordingly, from
pleasant to unpleasant or discomforting food experiences. These foods are then related to
concepts and issues such as identity, family, community, nationality, ethnicity, class,
sense of place, tradition, stress, health, discomfort, guilt, betrayal, and loss, contributing
to a deeper understanding of comfort food as a significant social category of human
behavior around food.
Contributors to the anthology come primarily from the field of folklore studies
and apply this perspective to their essays. They attend to food as an aesthetic experience
through which individuals and groups construct and perform their identities,
relationships, values, and understandings of the universe.13 This approach emphasizes
personal agency in creating meaning, but also recognizes the role of power structures and
systems in shaping the possibilities for each individual. It also tends to highlight the
overlooked and mundane, the foods or individuals not usually thought of as significant.
Comfort food, for example, is usually associated with home and family—the feminine,
domestic sphere—and with unrefined cooking that warrants little attention from those
trained in the culinary arts or of more gourmand tastes. At the same time, a folkloristic
approach sees all cultural products as potential sources for the expression of creativity
and the construction of meaning, so that mass-produced commercial foods can become
integral traditions just as much as those foods that have been handed down over
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generations within a family by imitation or word-of-mouth. From this perspective,
comfort food is an ideal subject for examining the interplay of marketing,
commodification, iconization, and other such processes with individuals finding and
attaching personal meaningfulness to their food.
The authors draw upon a diversity of ethnographic and archival sources for data
to analyze, ranging from personal interviews and observations to auto-ethnography. The
last refers to “ethnography of one’s self or one’s group,”14 and lends itself also to
reflexive analysis of the impact of the ethnographer on the people being studied and the
information gleaned from them. Comfort food is a rather “elastic” category, representing
different foods to different people and therefore highly subjective. It also seems to be
particularly subject to current trends in the marketplace and in attitudes towards food and
health. Discussing it tends to open the proverbial “can of worms,” so that individuals
being interviewed or observed begin questioning it and their own responses to it.
Scholarship in the ethnography of the senses is also relevant to comfort food and
is implicit in much of the research in this volume. As Paul Stoller points out in his
groundbreaking book, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), academia in the west has
privileged sight over other senses, leading to an emphasis in scholarship on intellectual
and cognitive understanding over other more sensory ways of experiencing the world.
Food offers full use of all the senses, and some aspects of it can be perceived only at a
sensual level rather than a verbal (oral or written) one. The researcher therefore should
attend to a range of possible ways in which individuals may perceive the world. Also,
memory is literally embodied in the senses. The taste of food conjures images of the past
or particular people; its aromas remind one of places; its texture can take one back to a
previous experience—sometimes literally.15 Comfort food seems to function as a category
partly because of its appeal to the senses. It frequently gives literal comfort by warming
the body or filling the stomach, but it also evokes memories of pleasant sensory
experiences. Recognition of the significance of the senses in people’s relationships to
comfort food runs throughout the essays in this volume.
Chapter 1 concentrates on the emotional and physiological satisfaction afforded
by comfort food that is usually emphasized in conceptualizations, along with the
relationship between stress and consumption. Among the hypotheses for craving and
partaking of comfort food that Michael Jones explores are the role of emotional relief,
physical sensations and satiety, pharmacological components of the item, and
associations with people, places, and events. He considers chocolate in particular, “the
food of the gods,” which for many American women is the quintessential comfort food, a
conception reinforced by folklore, the mass media, and popular culture objects.
Rachelle Saltzman, in the second chapter, examines pudding as an integral part of
English national identity. Through historical research supplemented with observations
and interviews, she explores the development of whim whams, spotted dick, jam roly-
poly, and other savory and sweet puddings and the processes by which they became so
associated with the English that they were referred to in the nineteenth century as the
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“Pudding Eaters.” More recently, the National Trust’s “pudding campaign” encouraged
pudding consumption, and the Environment Secretary urged citizens to eat more sweet
puddings made with local ingredients rather than unpatriotically consuming foreign
products. Although many immigrants reside in the country whose non-pudding fare is
impacting the culinary culture, a taxi driver told Saltzman, “They may be British but
they’ll never be English.” Pudding as comfort food, then, is intimately tied to national
identity.
In Chapter 3, Susan Eleuterio, with the assistance of three long-time Chicago
residents, focuses on ways in which a sense of community and feelings of belonging are
generated in commercial contexts, such as local cafeterias. Focusing on Valois, a favorite
breakfast spot of former Senator and now President Barack Obama, in Chicago, Eleuterio
explores how a place of business can not only offer comfort food, but also become a
place of comfort. Although it is also a tourist destination, Valois is known among certain
community members as a place where you can “see your food,” interact easily with
others over a leisurely meal, feel at home, enjoy familiar fare, and experience a haven of
comfort and normality; in sum, an opportunity for commensality. Sharing the political
values associated with its most famous fan contributes to the sense of community.
Authored by Alicia Roberts, the fourth chapter concerns the summer custom of
going for doughboys (sugary fried dough) at clam shacks in seaside Rhode Island. A
tradition among the working class from mill cities nearby, the practice as well as the food
function as markers of class distinctions, insider identity, and cultural pride. Crafted on
the coast, doughboys acquire the scent of Oakland Beach and, cooked in the same oil as
the clam cakes, they have a hint of the flavor of locally harvested clams; as such, they
exhibit terroir, "a sense of place," that comforts many of the diners.
Chapter 5, by Jillian Gould, examines the intergenerational connections of a
single, simply prepared item. Called “egg-in-the-hole,” “man on the raft,” “Popeyes,”
“one-eyed Jacks,” and other names, the food consists of a piece of bread in which the
center is torn out and an egg is fried in the hole. Utilizing auto-ethnography and
historical analysis of the tradition, the author reveals how this source of comfort and
memories, through its preparation rather than taste, unites three generations of women
two of whom are now deceased, connecting the survivor with the past and, in the present,
with her daughter. The dish, then, exemplifies comfort food grounded in home and the
family.
In the sixth chapter, Yvonne and William Lockwood consider the concepts of
heritage and nostalgia as significant, perhaps even primary, motivations for some Finnish
Americans in the upper Midwest to perpetuate or revitalize the tradition of preparing and
eating Finnish fare, including “poverty food.” A favorite item is viili, a fermented milk
product, despite the fact that those of Finnish descent have an astonishingly high rate of
lactose intolerance. Lovers of viili enjoy the stringy, slippery texture that frequently
repulses most non-Finnish Americans to the extent that children compare it with snot.
For many Finnish Americans, the nostalgia satisfied through this dish is for a childhood,
family, or experiences not from the home country but from the strong ethnic community
7
as it existed through the 1940s; thus, the comfort offered by this food represents an
idealized past.
In Chapter 7, Lucy Long investigates the emergence of culinary tourism featuring
comfort food. The opposite of the more usual exotic, fine-dining, and unique foods
found in such tourism, comfort food would not seem to be of interest to tourists; however,
it appears to be growing in popularity. Based on her own experiences and observations as
well as an examination of advertisements for tours primarily in the Midwest but
elsewhere throughout the world, she identifies the qualities of comfort food that are
highlighted in culinary tourism and examines the ways in which comfort food might
function for tourists. A major theme in both categories of experience is home, either as a
physical space or a metaphor for security and familiarity; its role in tourism suggests that
home itself may now be considered exotic.
The chapters to this point consider the positive associations of comfort food, such
as combatting stress and feelings of loneliness, identification with home,
intergenerational connections and other social linkages, commensality and community,
memories of joyful events and cordial relations, and nostalgia about the past. These
characteristics are implied or stated in dictionary definitions and they are apparent from
survey research conducted by Locher et al., Wansink et al., and Troisi and Gabriel; they
are developed and discussed more fully in Comfort Food Meanings and Memories.
Subsequent chapters in this anthology, however, address negative aspects of comfort food
by exploring health concerns, feelings of discomfort, and the subversion of taken-for-
granted assumptions about family, tradition, and history.
In her essay on bologna in Chapter 8, Diane Tye raises the specter of unhealthful
qualities in what has become a pervasive comfort food in the Canadian Atlantic region.
Although it is loaded with high amounts of sodium, saturated and trans fat, and
cholesterol along with sodium nitrate that has been linked to the formation of
carcinogenic nitrosamines, people nevertheless persist in avidly consuming bologna. In a
diet historically low in protein as well as fruits and vegetables, this processed meat
product remains relatively inexpensive, requires little preparation, is convenient, and
lends itself to creative dishes. Turning a blind eye to nutritional deficiencies and high
rates of chronic disease, residents tout “Newfoundland steak” as “traditional,” a regional
food commemorating earlier times and common in the ritual of homecoming and family
visits.
Chapter 9, by Sheila Bock, focuses on soul food, which has become a contested
cuisine providing comfort through racial pride and cultural achievement on the one hand,
and on the other, discomfort owing to the health crisis that has arisen among African
Americans because of the high fat and sodium content of some dishes and their
preparations. Through an examination of recent cookbooks the author delineates ways in
which some African Americans are re-conceptualizing and re-presenting “tradition” as a
tool of intervention.
In Chapter 10, LuAnne Roth turns her attention to concepts of memory and
discomfort as she explores food-centric films, both ethnographic and fictional. While in
8
daily life memories are recalled through smell, taste, and mouth-feel, in film they are
generated and conveyed through sound and visuals. Her explorations reveal how key
cinematic scenes regarding food depict otherwise unexpressed emotions, conflict, chronic
bingeing, efforts at controlling others, trauma, and the combatting of loneliness stemming
from childhood neglect.
Annie Tucker, in the last chapter, examines three short stories by Puthut EA, a
young writer from Yogyakarta, Central Java, whose works have frequently appeared in
major national publications and numerous anthologies. He establishes familiar
associations of comfort food, such as family, identity, belonging, and pleasure, but then
subverts them to address instances of overbearing parental authority, ruthless exploitation
of the environment, and brutal political violence. He imbues foods with a “culinary
conscience,” asking readers to ponder what happens when comforting foods of identity
become haunted by aching memories.
The essays in Comfort Food Meanings and Memories offer a foundation for
further exploration of comfort food. As a subject of study the category is relevant to a
number of scholarly disciplines, most obviously food studies, folkloristics, and
anthropology, but also American culture studies, cultural studies, global and international
studies, tourism, marketing, and public health. It also represents a category of eating
experiences that resonates with most of us and that can be easily understood in one’s own
life, enabling us as scholars to better understand the significance of emotions and
memories in human behavior. It therefore offers a window for exploring the relationships
among our foodways patterns, our own past experiences, and larger forces in society that
shape those relationships. Whether such foods generate feelings of comfort or cause
distress, unite families or produce conflict, celebrate tradition or challenge it, remind
individuals of pleasant experiences or force them to confront painful memories, they
warrant close examination for what they reveal about the human condition and people’s
relationship to the fare that they consume.
NOTES
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1 The recognition that food carries meaning is standard in scholarship today. Anthropologist Sidney
Mintz explains: “For us humans…eating is never a ‘purely biological’ activity…The foods eaten
have histories associated with the pasts of those who eat them; the techniques employed to find,
process, prepare, serve, and consumer the foods are all culturally variable, with histories of their
own. Nor is the food every simply eaten; its consumption is always conditioned by meaning. These
meanings are symbolic, and communicated symbolically; they also have histories.” (1996: 7)
2 The idea of modernity creating a sense of distance comes originally from critiques of
industrialization that tended to somewhat romanticize the pastoral and the past. For an overview of
Romantic Nationalism’s influence on the discipline of folkloristics, see William A. Wilson, “Herder,
Folklore and Romantic Nationalism,” in Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader, edited by
Elliot Oring (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1989), pp. 21-37. Marxist critiques tie modernity
to capitalism and probably the most famous for promoting the idea of distance as a result of the two
forces.
3 One of the most influential writings on the isolation created by modern life is sociologist Robert
D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 2000). His powerful application of the French culture theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s notion
of social capital (“The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of
Education, edited by J. Richardson [New York, Greenwood, 1986, 241-258]) introduced the
concept to the larger public.
4 There are numerous excellent critiques of the industrial food system. One that combines
ethnography with insightful explorations into the mindset and ethos behind western agriculture is
Deborah Barndt’s Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization on the Tomato Trail (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), in which she clearly articulates the foundation laid by Rene
Descartes’s dualism between man and nature. Other scholarly critiques include Deborah Kay
Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003); Julie Guthman, Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in
California (Berkeley: University of California, 2004); Damian Maye, Lewis Holloway, and Moya
Kneafsey, eds., Alternative Food Geographies: Representation and Practice (Amsterdam: Elsevier,
2007); and Moya Kneafsey, Rosie Cox, Lewis Holloway, Elizabeth Dowler, Laura Venn, and
Helena Tuomainen, Consumers, Producers and Food: Exploring Alternatives (New York: Berg,
2008). Journalist Michael Pollan brought these issues to the attention of the general public in his
book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006).
5 For example, the concept of “mindfulness” is currently being applied to eating, with classes, on-
line instructions, and the media popularizing the notion of finding “wholeness” in this way.
Numerous “how-to” books are available on the subject.
6 For insightful treatments of the issues surrounding food and globalization, see Alexander
Nützenadel and Frank Trentmann, eds., Food and Globalization (Oxford: Berg, 2008); James L.
Watson and Melissa L. Caldwell, eds., The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2005); and Richard R. Wilk, Home Cooking in the Global Village (Oxford: Berg, 2006).
7 Food as an expression of identity as well as a medium through which identity can be constructed,
performed, and negotiated was a major theme in foundational folkloristic studies of food in the
1970s and 80s. See, for example, Michael Owen Jones, Bruce B. Giuliano, and Roberta Krell, eds.
Foodways and Eating Habits: Directions for Research (Los Angeles, CA: California Folklore
Society, 1983); Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell, eds., Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the
United States: The Performance of Group Identity (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press,
1984);
Humphrey, Theodore C., and Lin T. Humphrey. We Gather Together: Food and Festival in
American Life (Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1988); Charles Camp, American Foodways: What,
When, Why, and How We Eat in America (Little Rock: August House, 1989); Kathy Neustadt,
Clambake: A History and Celebration of an American Tradition (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts, 1992). For more recent summaries of folkloristic approaches to food and identity,
see Lucy M. Long, "Learning to Listen to the Food Voice: Recipes as Expressions of Identity and
Carriers of Memory" (Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary
Research 71/, 2004, pp. 118-22); Lucy M. Long, "Food and Identity in the Americas: Introduction,"
Journal of American Folklore 122/483, 2009, pp. 3-10); and Lucy M. Long, ed. The Food and
Folklore Reader (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). Anthropologists have also been concerned with
food and identity, and an excellent introduction is Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, eds.,
Food and Culture: A Reader (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013). Also see references in endnote 11.
The implications of food as commodity are explored in Warren James Belasco and Philip Scranton,
eds. Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies. (New York: Routledge, 2002).
8 George H. Lewis, “The Maine Lobster as Regional Icon: Competing Images over Time and Social
Class,” in A Taste of American Place: A Reader on Regional and Ethnic Foods, edited by Barbara
G. Shortridge and James R. Shortridge (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998, pp. 65-83); C.
Paige Guttierrez, “The Social and Symbolic Uses of Ethnic/Regional Foodways: Cajuns and
Crawfish in South Louisiana,” in Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The
Performance of Group Identity, edited by Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell (Knoxville: The
University of Tennessee Press, 1984, pp. 169-192); Marcie Cohen Ferris, The Edible South: The
Power of Food and the Making of an American Region (Chapel Hill: the University of North
Carolina Press, 2015). For overviews of ethnic and regional foods as symbols from a folkloristic
perspective, see Susan Kalck, “Ethnic Foodways in America: Symbol and the Performance of
Identity” in Brown and Mussel (1984, pp. 37-65) and Lucy M. Long, Regional American Food
Culture (Greenwood Press, 2009).
9 Nostalgia in relation to food has been studied by a number of scholars, particularly from a cultural
perspective and is oftentimes tied to notions of nationalism, modernity, and globalization. See, for
example, Anita Mannur, “Culinary Nostalgia, Authenticity, Nationalism and Diaspora,” in Culinary
Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010, 27-
78); Susan L. Stowers, “Gastronomic Nostalgia: Salvadoran Immigrants Craving for Their Ideal
Meal,” Ecology of Food and Nutrition, Vol. 51, no. 5, 374-393; Mark Swislocki, Culinary
Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and Urban Experience in Shanghai (Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 2008); Maria Amelia Viteri, “Nostalgia Food and Belonging: Ecuadorans in New
York City,” in Ethnicity, Citizenship, and Belonging: Practice, Theory, and Spatial Dimensions,
edited by Sarah Albiez, Nelly Castro, Lara Jüssen, and Eva Youkhana (Vervuert: Iberoamericana,
2011: 221-236); and Allen S. Weiss, ed., Taste Nostalgia (New York: Lusitania Press, 1997). An
article specifically on comfort foods, loneliness, and nostalgia is Karen Stein, “ Comfort Foods:
Bringing Back Old Favorites,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 108/ 3 (March 2008):
412, 414. Scholarship on food and memory is also relevant here: David E. Sutton, Remembrance of
Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (New York: Berg, 2001).
10 Proust is commonly cited in reference to the power of food to bring about, what he called
“involuntary memory.” His anecdote and musings about eating an madeleine was published
originally (in French) in seven parts between 1913 and 1927 as À la recherche du temps perdu. The
novel was translated into English with two titles, Remembrance of Things Past, trans., C. K. Scott-
Moncrieff, Joseph Wood Krutch, and F. A. Blossom (New York: Random House, 1934) and In
Search of Lost Time, trans., C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright (London:
Vintage, 1996).
11 Diane Tye’s auto-ethnography of her mother’s baking is an excellent example of the complexity
of family food traditions. Her mother baked out of duty and did not enjoy it, but it was a central part
of the family routine and figures significantly in Tye’s memories of her childhood and of her
mother. See Baking as Biography: A Life Story in Recipes (Ithaca: Mcgill-Queen’s University Press,
2010). Also, sharing meals is oftentimes thought of as a positive and bonding experience, however,
many individuals have negative memories of eating together, as suggested poignantly by Alice P.
Julier in the title of her book, Eating Together: Food, Friendship, and Inequality (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2013). For more critical analysis of the social act of eating together, see
Commensality: from Everyday Food to Feast, edited by Susanne Kerner, Cynthia Chou, and Morten
Warmind (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).
12 That food is tied to our sense of self—our identity and our worth—is not surprising considering
that it bridges so many aspects of our lives. Isabelle de Solier explores this role of food in Food and
the Self: Consumption, Production and Material Culture (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). Also see
Leon R. Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and Perfecting of Our Nature (Chicago: the University of
Chicago Press, 1994); Fabio Parasecoli, Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture (New York: Berg,
2008).
13 For discussion of folkloristic perspectives on food, see Lucy M. Long, ed., The Food and
Folklore Reader (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).
14 Kirin Narayan, Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012, 95).
15 Along with Stoller, other foundational works on these concepts include Constance Classen,
Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures (London: Routledge, 1993);
Yi-Fu Tuan, Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture (Washington, D.C.:
Island Shearwater, 1993); C. Nadia Seremetakis, The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as
Material Culture in Modernity (Boulder: Westview, 1994); Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of
Taste: Food & Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999). An excellent introduction to the concepts
and issues surrounding an anthropology of the senses is given by David Howes in his edited
volume, Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005). See in particular
his "Introduction: Empire of the Senses" (pp. 1-17) and Alain Corbin’s essay, "Charting the
Cultural History of the Senses," (pp. 128-39) for the larger cultural contexts for this scholarship.
Issues of how to document and interpret sensory experiences are discussed in Sarah Pink’s Doing
Sensory Ethnography (Los Angeles: Sage, 2009) and by Mark Dingemanse, Clair Hill, Asifa Majid,
and Stephen C. Levinson in “Ethnography of the Senses,” in Field Manual Volume 11, edited by
Asifa Majid (Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 2008 18-28).
