Traditional Feasts Serve Up Food's Emotional Power

Busy prepping for Thanksgiving Day's shared feasting, I began to think about the role food plays in our lives and our literature. There's no denying that food generates some of our most evocative memories of emotions, places, and people. Few other experiences can match eating for both cultural uniqueness and universality. Numerous old saws equate food and love (the way to a man's heart, of course). Why? In The Omnivorous Mind, John Allen has written a whole book about the evolving human relationship with food. Nearly all cultures engage in feasting to commemorate past or seasonal events with an abundance of food. The practice probably began about 1 million or 2 million years ago, posits Allen, when humans began hunting really big animals, like mammoths, and needed to share temporary excesses of food so that it would not go to waste. When agriculture developed, humans added harvest feasts--which led to our own Thanksgiving tradition. But our relationship with food is more than historical; somewhere along our evolutionary path, we developed the special wiring that makes food so central to human social and emotional life. For one thing, Allen points out, the digestive system produces hormones like insulin, leptin and ghrelin that act on the hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in memory; thus, we tend to remember food events, and a certain food can trigger vivid recall of people, settings and feelings. The brain's dopamine system, which rewards us with feelings of pleasure, also becomes active when people look at a favorite food--or someone they love. In our brains, food really is linked to love. To get ready for the feasts still ahead, you may want to sample food's emotional resonance in stories such as Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, Babette's Feast by Isak Dinesen, and A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote. And you can check out Allen's book at http://www.amazon.com/The-Omnivorous-Mind-Evolving-Relationship-ebook/dp/B008533FSI