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What is comfort food? Why do we cherish it, rely on it and need it so? Science attempts to explain our need for comfort food as a chemical reaction in the brain. The brain releases certain "feel good" hormones into the body to compensate for all the different negative feelings that overwhelm us in every day life like: fatigue, stress, illness or, my favorite, the ickies. But, I think there is a deeper connection to feelings and peoples need for comfort foods. After all if it was all hormonally induced then we would all agree upon what is a comfort food and what is not. One person's comfort food is another person's dieting nemesis.

Selection and choice of comfort food is a very personal thing, more behavioral and cultural then chemical. Comfort foods are tied to times and places in our memories that remind of us safety, joy, warmth and well. comfort. Some find fried chicken to be a comfort food because it takes them back in time to the memoirs to family barbecues in their back yard where they prepared, ate, laughed and loved every year and when it was over looked forward to the next time the gathering would happen. They were safe at these events and it grounded them in their sense of self. During rough times in our lives we seek to ground ourselves and find that sense of self that often gets lost when life becomes hectic and crazy. We may not be able to go to those exact moments in time, but we can have physical foods that mentally bring out those feels of love safety and self.

We don't have just one great memory that helps us cope with lives challenges, which means most of us don't have just one comfort food. I myself have several and depending on how I feel and what's immediately available, will pull from my list of comfort foods:

Mac and Cheese not from the box
Chili with onions and cheese on the top
Scalloped Potatoes with Ham
Eggs over easy with Toast and bacon
Chinese Food and Red Wine

I can tie each of these foods to many great memories in my life that caused them to become my comfort foods as well as the times in my life when I turned to them when the world was not being kind to me. When I eat these foods they don't necessarily remind me of the events that allowed them to be come my precious comfort foods, but they do make my life a little easier and gets me back to my sense of self. Theses feelings that control our lives are managed by the complex hormones in our brains. So maybe science does have a point with their theories.

I encourage you to share your own comfort foods and the stories behind them. Who knows, reading these may help others find comfort themselves.

Learn more about this author, Audrey Kerchner.
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