Taste
Comfort food helps many when life gets difficult

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

It was her day off, and Patty Yamamoto was sleeping in her Mililani home on the morning of Sept. 11 when her husband woke her with the news that the United States had been attacked by terrorists.

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She rushed to the living room, took in the news and then, she recalls, "I just started cooking."

Yamamoto is not alone in turning to the kitchen for solace and distraction.

Around the country, bakeries and candy shops are reporting a brisk business. Individuals confess sitting mindless in front of the TV, digging for answers in the bottom of an ice cream carton. Many say they're craving familiar favorites: the foods commonly known as "comfort foods."

Yamamoto's husband, Bob, dressed for work and came out to find Patty stirring pancake batter. "You're eating a hot breakfast before you go anywhere," she told him. "I just felt like I couldn't let him go without feeding him. I think what I was saying was, 'I'm scared and I love you.' Also, cooking is my stress relief. It calms me down."

She cooked all day — stew, rice, bread brownies — "watching TV with one eye and watching the stove with the other."

Others indulged in foods they normally shun. TV show host Emme Tomimbang guiltily recalled a potato-chip binge as she watched the news of the terrorist attacks from a San Francisco hotel room, unable to fly home. "I have high blood pressure and I'm not even supposed to have potato chips, but it didn't matter right then," she said. "I just had to have this salt fix. It shocked me that I could even eat that many chips."

On Maui, Lloyd Yokoyama's Broke Da Mouth cookie company has experienced a 30 percent sales increase since Sept. 11. The reason is straightforward, said Yokoyama, a baking instructor at Maui Community College: "Cookies are comfort food."

Customers he has talked to at the Maui Swap Meet have told him that, nervous about their economic futures, they're not buying big-ticket items. But $2.50 for a 6-ounce bag of chocolate chip mac nut, peanut butter or coconut crunch cookies? "People need something ... They're not concerned about diet, they just wanna enjoy the moment," he said.

Many Americans says they turn to food for solace and distraction. Illustration by Jon Orque • The Honolulu Advertiser

Bonnie Friedman, a Maui publicist who lived for a while in the East, returned to the Valley Isle just days before the terrorist attacks. Since the attacks, she has been baking chocolate chip cookies daily.

"A close friend of mine decided to get a small group of people together on the Saturday after the attack to just be together and talk, or not to talk," she said. When Friedman arrived with her comfort cookies, a friend asserted, "I need comforting right now," and they ate dessert first.

Since the evening of her friends' gathering, Friedman has been handing out chocolate chip cookies to anyone who seems to "need" one. For Friedman, the smell of baking cookies is associated with her mother, an excellent baker. "It was something we did together, on sad days, on rainy days," she recalled. Too, chocolate reminds her of a family gathering place back in her native Brooklyn, a chocolate shop owned by cousins.

As an expatriate New Yorker, she said, "my heart is still broken. I can't believe what they did to my hometown." In an e-mail, her cousin said he didn't even know what he was doing, opening up the chocolate shop after the disaster. Friedman, recalling the warm smells of the place, e-mailed back, "what you're doing is providing a little comfort."

This need to gather and eat together has come over many people in the weeks following the attack. Michael Stern, co-author with his wife Jane of numerous books on American food ways and regional foods, said in their travels since Sept. 11, they've been drawn to small-town cafes, where coffee and the news of the day are always served.

In a phone interview from their Connecticut home, Stern said he and his wife know numerous people affected by the World Trade Tower attacks. But they were surprised to find that, even half a country removed, in the Midwest where they were researching stories last month, "we were not alone in our concerns, our worries, our fears. There is something very reassuring about that."

As they sipped hot, weak coffee and ate eggs and cinnamon rolls in Iowa, Stern was reminded that eating differs from other pleasant activities in a key way: "Food is necessary ... to share something that you need with another human being gives it a very special value." And in the past few weeks, he said, Americans have needed both food and comfort.

Those who have studied eating habits say an association between food and good feelings defines the comfort-food phenomenon. At the University of Illinois, marketing professor Brian Wansink and his students interviewed 1,005 people around the country last year about their favorite foods. They found that dishes become comfort foods for two primary reasons: They are associated with beloved people or because they recalled feelings the individual deemed worth recapturing.

"In all instances," Wansink wrote in publishing the study, "the feelings evoked were underlying factors in the drive toward consumption."

Or, as Sara Ban Breathnach more poetically called them in "A Daybook of Comfort and Joy" (Warner books, 1995), "foods transformed by love and memory."

Wansink was surprised to learn that 40 percent of the foods cited as bringing comfort were not what the study defined as "taste-good" processed snack foods. Many were homemade and relatively healthful — soup, pasta, mashed potatoes. "The popularity of less-advertised and less-indulgent foods lends credibility to the notion that comfort foods are distinct from 'taste-good' foods," the professor noted.

But what is a comfort food?

"If you grew up in Patch, N.M., your idea of comfort food might be four-alarm chili, but if you grew up in Minnesota eating raisin cream pie, four-alarm chili might be the least-comforting thing you can think of," said Stern. The commonality, he said, is that "it's a food that provides us with a feeling of safety."

"We can make some generalizations," Stern said. Comfort foods tend to be starchy, frequently sweet and are almost always easy to eat and to cook, he explained. "I don't want to have to worry about small bones when I'm in comfort mode."

O'ahu registered dietitian Daryl Smith-Oswald, a specialist in eating disorders and food-related behavior, agreed: "Comfort foods are often soft, bland, moist and easy on the mouth — mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese," she said, and they're very often carbohydrates. There's a physiological reason for this.

A little bit of regression is involved: "Babies are motivated by sweet. Their taste buds are acutely sensitive to other flavors. Anything bitter, sour, salty, they'll react strongly, negatively to. Breast milk is 44 percent carbohydrate." And, she said, "carbohydrate and sugar in foods affect the release of serotonin, a chemical that eases the stress chemicals in the body."

Furthermore, Smith-Oswald said, comfort foods "often seem to be associated with childhood and stress-free times, and possibly rewarding good behavior with treats." And "when you taste food, you're really smelling food. You taste 90 percent with your nose," and the olfactory glands are located very near the part of the brain that controls the emotions and stores emotional memory."

This double whammy of history and chemistry is one reason why it's so easy to fall into eating disorders, Smith-Oswald said. "There's not only an emotional link, but there's a physical link that drives this behavior and it's very hard to control both of these factors together at one time."

Smith-Oswald acknowledges that one night in front of the TV with a pint of Haagen-Daaz isn't a sure road to an eating disorder. In fact, she said, "it's a healthy, normal response to stress. There can be times when it's just one of the joys in life."

So when does comfort become trouble? When it becomes a habit, she said, "when an occasional event becomes an every-afternoon event."

"Anytime you use food to deal with feelings, that's somewhat of a misuse of food, and it can lead to dysfunctional ways of dealing with food." She paused and laughed. "Because it works! That's the bad part: Temporarily, you can feel better."