Emotions & Food

We have phrases like "comfort food," commercials that show people getting relief from a hard day with any number of foods, and encouragement from numerous sources to use food to soothe, especially children. Retail food producers use words like "bliss," "love," "joy," and of course, "comfort" to appeal to women. Messages of fun are used on kids, and anger, violence, and machismo target men. Consider Burger King's "Angry Whopper" and T.G.I. Fridays' "Brownie Obsession." Foods of all kinds are marketed to trigger an emotional response, along with or instead of a physical response. It's not good enough to say what makes the food delicious. In fact, many ads don't even mention the taste. It is enough to see a beautiful woman sensuously eating chocolate, a family laughing together over a quick and easy boxed meal, or a WWE wrestler flexing and shouting about a processed meat stick. What do we learn from these ads? We learn that food can make you relaxed, happy, content, beautiful, tough, cool, fun, and so on. We learn that food is about feelings, not nourishment.

Why does any of this matter? Because it creates a culture in which food is a mood enhancer and ego booster. Because it produces people who become emotionally addicted to food. Because it urges people to seek solace in something that may later make them feel disgusting (emotionally and physically). Because it obliterates the line between "eating to live" and "living to eat." When food is more connected to how we feel emotionally than physically, everything goes to hell.

And in America, we don't just stress the quality of the food, we also focus on the quantity. Every other restaurant ad touts how large the portions are, as if that's all that matters. Places like Joe's Crab Shack serve many items in buckets, and although they aren't usually filled from the bottom up, they give the illusion of a great deal of food. And that's a selling point. Considering how bombarded we are with large amounts of food as the commonplace, it's no wonder how many people don't know when to stop eating – especially when they're self-medicating with food. As children, we're overstimulated with food that (mostly) well-intentioned parents use as a distraction or a reward. Take a good long look in your grocery store's cereal and snack aisles. The number of offerings that provide any real nutritional value is overwhelmingly low. We have Kellogg's and Pillsbury fighting over which one has the better toaster pastry, neither of which is good for you on any conceivable level.

So what do those foods offer? Fun. Convenience. Happiness. Friendship (so easy to share!).

The revolving door of self-pity and self-hate that chronic overeaters experience comes from the use of food to numb the pain and feeling even worse because they ate all that food. But food is supposed to make you feel better, isn't it? That's the pervasive message that's beaten into us day after day. Food is love. Food is success. Food is sex. Food is wonderful. And some of it even tastes good.

Here's something you may not know: The fanciful copy that you find on packaged food, the copy that tells you why the food is so great, is called romance copy. 'Nough said.