Riddle time:
What causes some children to cry if they don’t have it and others to cry if they do? What do parents work hard to earn for their children—children who often take it for granted? What kills millions of people who don’t have it and millions who do? What causes some people to smile and others to cringe? What do some people spend a lifetime trying to obtain and others a lifetime trying to lose? What convinces young children to obey, makes pets do silly tricks, and brings people together in a powerful, meaningful way?
food.
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| picture source: Microsoft Clip Art |
Food has remarkable power. It can make a 2-year-old pick up his toys, entice a 12-year-old away from an Xbox, bring a smile to the face of an elderly woman, and bring a family together for an hour at the end of a crazy day.
Food’s powerful ability to toy with the emotions is worth noting. The smell of certain “comfort foods” often elicits pleasant childhood memories. Our powerful sense of smell, combined with our senses of sight and taste, makes us feel happy whenever we eat Mom’s meatloaf or sip hot cocoa made “just right”.
Comfort foods are more than a psychological phenomenon, they are founded in science. Scientists have discovered something they call “olfactory memories”—memories we link to certain smells. Smelling a particular food can cause us to remember things we would never remember otherwise (How Stuff Works). These olfactory memories can be light-hearted: I was sitting at a round, 4-person table…the waitress came with a steaming hot plate of stir-fried rice…we proceeded to spend the next three hours ordering multiple more orders of stir-fried rice and reminiscing…somehow I ended up spilling soy sauce all over my new, white jacket. (So that’s what the stain is from!)...at the end of the meal I got a fortune cookie that read “You are to be the recipient of a large number of somethings.” We all laughed about it…on the way out of the restaurant, the waitress gave me sixteen tiny thank-you mints. Olfactory memories can also elicit more meaningful memories: It was the morning of my 10th birthday. She made my favorite cake—three layers of puffy, yellow cake with moist, sweet pineapple oozing out of the sides. I blew out all the candles but one. My wish came true anyway.
College cafeterias love making what they call “comfort food” in an attempt to give a student a sense of home-ness. It never works for me. I think comfort foods are unique to the individual. For me, it isn’t chicken pot pie or macaroni and cheese that brings back good memories. For me, it’s apple crisp.
It’s simple, really. Toss a bunch of apples with some sugar and cinnamon, top it with a simple oatmeal and butter crumble, cook until warm and bubbly. It is as simple as it is wonderful. The apples turn tender and sweet, the sugar syrupy, the oatmeal toasty. If nothing in the past five months has caused me to become homesick, smelling apple crisp just might do the trick.
So I tried an experiment. I chopped up an apple, mixed in some applesauce, threw some homemade granola on top, and microwaved it until the apples were tender (ish) and the granola was toasty (or as close as you can get to toasty in a dorm’s microwave).
I’m eating it right now. Proof: apple on the keyboard.
Oops...
More proof:
Strangely, it didn’t make me homesick. It did, however, make me absurdly happy. As I said before, food has remarkable power.
