This week’s guest speaker Steve Farrelly’s passion about his Breakfast club, really pushed me to write about food from an emotionally charged perspective.
How do you eat your meal?
How do you feel before, during and after?
Did your food open doors of opportunity?
Food is almost always accompanied by emotion, and as humans we don’t eat food just for strength, we eat it for a feeling of something or to even feed a starving memory.
The kids in Steve’s breakfast club initially came to fill their tummies but left filling their hearts as well. These kids didn’t have stability emotionally, financially or in their family. We’ve heard from all our guest speakers that through the presence of food is community. Does that mean the absence of food could indicate a lack of community?
Could the mere therapeutic essence of food identify and bring together broken families?
Does food carry not only a nutritious weight, but an emotional one?
For me personally I had an episode in my life where I felt like life was meaningless. The discovery of cooking was food’s open door of opportunity, allowed me to harvest my emotions that’s driving me at the time, into the food I ate. The creative aspect of food gave me something to strive for and to stretch the limitations of taste one day.
We know that food can save a physical life can it save an emotional one?
References and a really good read:
https://www.mentalhealth.org.nz/assets/ResourceFinder/Feeding-Minds.pdf
Food definitely has it’s deeper meanings! I am really glad to see that food was a way of reconnecting with yourself! Food for many people is sort of like an ‘escape’. Steve Farrelly’s talk also made me think about the wider perspectives of food. Whether it makes us feel happy, accomplished or connected. Throughout your blog along with the lectures during Plate 1 we can learn that food isn’t just for individuals to consume. It’s for individuals to share and connect over.
To answer your question at the end, yes. I believe food can save an ’emotional life’. As you argue in your blog, food can open doors of opportunity. This can do so much to one’s self-esteem. It would be really interesting to conduct some further research on your points regarding the connection between mental health and food. How can we work towards solving it? It is something I am personally interested in!
I love this! Those quick fire questions really made me ponder my personal answers but also re-evaluate the somewhat shallow perspective from which I view food – sustenance, instagram story, satisfaction. The emotional weight of food is a gorgeously intriguing notion, made so real by your personal episode! looking back on my normal dinner with my mum that I had tonight, I can only imagine how hard it would be for me to go through life without them. In that sense, food has been saving me every day of my life, and I never knew.
Wow very nice pictures and questions XD
I personally think that food definitely plays a big part in us not only physically but emotionally as well. It is a symbol of care and love, and to feel emotionally well we need to feel that we are cared for by the peope surrounding us.
The act of sharing food shows directly that someone loves so much that they are willing to sacrafice their own physical need and offer it to you. It builds trust and love, and is therefore in essential in forming long term healthy relationships. Also the act of preparing food together, and sitting down to eat togther all have important cultural values. As it is often seen as the one of the most fundamental actions that brings people together.
E.g. No one wants to each lunch aloone :'(
I love this, as food is pretty much the gateway to my heart.
Whenever I tell people that I am miserable without food that I love – that it has such a significant impact on my mood – they think I’m kind of a weirdo, and yes, I am… but utilising food as a treatment to my soul doesn’t make me weird. As you said, eating is accompanied by emotion, as we often eat so that we can feel *something*. It fills a void (not just that grumbling emptiness in our abdomens), and many of us just take that for granted, I think, when we have such easy access to food.
You ask if the mere therapeutic essence of food can mend broken families, and I believe it can. While I haven’t necessarily experienced that in practice, I know it has mended ME in many ways.
The crunch of the crust on a piece of homemade bread; the comfort of eating rhubarb and custard on the couch with my mum during our nighttime TV time; even the simple pleasure of eating way too many apples at once during their season.
These are the experiences that calm me during my most stressful times (call me a “stress-eater”, if you will). Maybe that means I’ve developed an unhealthy reliance on food, but I don’t care anymore at this point. Food has truly fed my emotionally-starved self and perhaps with better education, our greater populous may realise that they, too, have also been mended in some way by food.
I genuinely loved reading your post! especially your title – made me want to be part of a movement that fights for the emotionally starved. The way you wrote was very real and simultaneously light hearted which complimented your writing topic.
There is no doubt that we connect emotions with food because we naturally find ourselves relying on food to satisfy our cravings in more than just a physical sense of “I have a massive sweet tooth right now so I’m going to have a cheeky bite of chocolate.” A particular moment in my life where I became emotionally connected or attached to food was when I was travelling. I was away from home for about seven months and during that time I indulged in many amazing cuisines across Europe, however, there came a time where I just missed home food. My dads infamous fish pie, my favourite “classic kiwi” pizza at my favourite restaurant down the road, burger burger dates with the girls became a “starving memory”… I couldn’t wait to dive into a home cooked meal not because I didn’t like the food where I was travelling, but because of the comfort and nostalgia I had with food back home. So a tip from a rookie traveller like me, pack some of your favourite home treats in your bag whilst on your travels incase you do start to feel a little emotionally starved ;).
As a psychologist student I am also intrigued by your ideas behind the emotional connection with food touching upon mental health. Since these emotional connections or attachments we have with food definitely influence a healthy or unhealthy state of mind. My mum has always been an advocate for “mindful eating” – how you feel before, during and after eating is just as important as the type of foods you put inside you.
I definitley think food has strong connections with our emotions. Because of the fact that when we prepare food for someone we usually do so with the hope that they will enjoy it (I hope), that this emanates a sense of caring. So for that reason the connotations behind food preparation could serve a powerful role in strengthening family relationships, even more so when different parts of a family and/or community participates in the preparation of one meal, this can creates a two-way effect of implying and recieving love and care. To go even further than this, I also think the more involved an individual/group is involved in the process of planting/harvesting the food, more personal the idea of sharing food is, and thus this can lead to the creation of feelings of nostalgia and help build a sense of identity.