Stukel- Week 4

           One phrase, which is defined by Jonathan Safran Foer in his book Eating Animals is Comfort Food. Generally, when one pictures comfort food, images of warm apple pie, blueberry pancakes with powdered sugar and whipped cream, baked homemade Mac N’ Cheese, and Ben and Jerry’s “Phish Food” ice cream, come to mind. In Eating Animals, Foer describes his experience with comfort food as the time that his friends brought him and his wife food when their son was in the hospital, and the food they ate at a Polish diner after their son was cured enough to be released. The interesting thing about this is that none of these foods necessarily fall into one specific group. Some are sweet, some are bitter, some are cheesy, some are fruity, yet they are all considered comfort food. This begs the question: what makes comfort food considered comfort food? To each individual person in the world the definition of comfort food could be different. To one person it could be their mother’s homemade chocolate-covered popcorn; to another it could be their favorite lentil soup recipe that they whip up on Tuesdays after work and share with their cat while watching American Idol. One thing that these all have in common is that they are all associated with certain feelings and experiences. Eating the food is not so much about how it tastes but how it makes one feel. Comfort foods are enjoyable because they bring us back to certain memories or emotions that we felt while eating them. This brings us back to one of Foer’s reoccurring themes: food holds meaning to us as individuals and what we associate it with defines our choice to consume it. Essentially Foer is raising the question of: if food is associated with the horrors of the food industry then shouldn’t we feel uncomfortable eating it?