Being comfortable has become a new, ubiquitous standard of being. People wear comfortable loose clothes, they sit in comfortable soft couches, they interact with those who share their political views, since that is comforting. The notion of comfort applies to what we wish to eat as well. Michael Owen Jones's and Lucy Long's new edited volume, Comfort Food: Meanings and Memories, presents a timely, important topic for contemporary Americans. Jones and Long have individually contributed much to the folkloristic oeuvre of food culture, and their new joint volume adds to the growing list of publications that focus on the attitudes and identities associated with food consumption (though there is not so much on production, preparation, preservation, or performance).
The volume contains eleven articles that consider these topics: self-medicating with foods; pudding in England; food and politics at a Chicago diner; doughnut holes in Rhode Island; egg-in-a-hole and family history; villi and Finnish American identity; comfort food and its role in culinary tourism; boloney in Newfoundland; soul food and African American identification; comfort food in films; and culinary references in Indonesian literature.
In their joint introduction, Jones and Long tell us how comfort food is defined and they describe the psychological, emotional, and physical effects on the eater. Comfort food often provides positive childhood or familial associations, it is frequently consumed during periods of stress or unhappiness, and it is often indulgent: starchy, sweet, fatty. Many of the authors in the book offer patterns of who eats what; for example, mac and cheese and mashed potatoes are comfort food for many Americans, as is chocolate, which is the most craved food in the United States, especially among women. But generalizations of this kind assume there are homogeneities among the populations of the United States. Do all Americans crave mac and cheese, or only some, say those who grew up eating it, or those of European descent who live in the Midwest? Do Mexican Americans in California, Chinese Americans in New York City, and Indian Americans in Atlanta all crave the same thing? I doubt it, especially if craving and nostalgia are linked to what your parents made at home, what you associate with an extended family, and what you ate during times of celebration. This is not to say that the generalizations are wrong, but simple generalizations point to the need to collect more data in order to derive more complex and nuanced patterns that take into account different age groups, social classes, and ethnic and regional populations in the United States. While some of the articles in this volume do attempt to delineate regional or national patterns, they still tend to make facile assumptions about social class and cultural homogeneity.
Michael Owen Jones ends his article, "'Stressed' Spelled Backwards is 'Desserts': Self-Medicating Moods with Foods," by acknowledging that more research needs to be done on the topic, especially ethnographic fieldwork (34). He correctly states that most of the data we have on comfort food has been collected from college students, who represent a particular demographic. The other sources of information in the book come from Yelp reviewers, newspaper articles, listservs, and blogs. While providing some useful data, such sources are decontextualized, offering little of the kind of data we need to understand food consumption, especially the biographical data that could explain why a particular dish is considered comfort food by particular people. Rich, complete data, containing information about who cooks what and when, and who eats what and when and with whom, for example, could move the study of comfort food into the realm of performance-centered ethnography, positioning comfort food along with the more detailed and comprehensive studies of other varieties of folklore.
Folklorists know that an abundance of data can allow for deeper contextualization, enhancing interpretations of meanings, intentions, and functions. The two best articles in the volume, not surprisingly, provide that level of contextualization for the comfort food being discussed. Annie Tucker's "Haunted Tongues and Hollow Comforts: Examples of Culinary Conscience in Indonesian Fiction" analyzes three main dishes as they appear in the short stories of writer Puthut EA. The stories involve certain dishes that could be considered positive and comforting to Indonesians, though they can acquire uncomfortable meanings and negative associations through social, cultural, political, or familial interactions and actions. The everyday foods--fried rice (nasi goring) for example--take on deep meaning by evoking dramatic events in the life of a family or a nation. Tucker's article expands the definition of comfort food: the same food can be comforting and desirable at one period of one's life, and it can become uncomfortable and avoided at another. Food choices need to be documented in terms of personal history, both at the intimate familial level and at the broader, regional, national, or political levels.
The second noteworthy article is Jillian Gould's "Hungry for My Past: Kitchen Comfort with Fried Bread and Eggs," which examines the egg-in-a-hole dish as it is prepared and eaten over a period of time, by different members of the same family, in the different emotional contexts of their lives. Through the egg-in-a-hole dish, Gould offers us a description of comfort food as "'everyday' food items prepared in home kitchens" (111). The article points to the importance of the study of repertoires of food, of variation in methods and ingredients, of observation and imitation, of memory and changing meanings. Though Gould engages in auto-ethnography and analyzes herself and her own family, she does provide a good method to follow in studying others. As with other kinds of material culture, the finished food product must also be understood in the contexts of personal biography; of learning, teaching, and making; of materials, tools, and techniques; of changes over time; and of evaluations by the maker and others. I have written about the study of dress benefiting from detailed sartorial autobiographies; likewise, foodways could be enhanced by noting gastronomic autobiographies, documenting changes of cooking and eating over a lifetime (Shukla, 2015).
While Jones's and Long's Comfort Food: Meanings and Memories is an uneven volume, as all edited volumes are, it does introduce the topic of comfort food for serious study, and the editors and authors provide us with methods to accept or not. They will help us develop a launching pad for future ethnographic projects with different populations in the United States and abroad, as we learn what comfort food is for different people, at different points in their lives, for different reasons. I commend Jones and Long for giving us, once again, more food for thought.
Work Cited
Pravina Shukla, "The Future of Dress Scholarship: Sartorial Autobiographies and the Social History of Clothes," Dress: The Annual Journal of the Costume Society of America 41 (2015): 53-68.
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[Review length: 1119 words • Review posted on April 5, 2018]