Why are there so many emotions tied up with food for some people?

I will address your question from a senior citizens point of view.

Next time you are around several senior citizens. watch how they act around food. to some of them, being fed is the highlight of their life. they enjoy each bite of food as though it were their last. this may be true, in some cases.

As you become older, food takes on a new meaning in life. watch and see.

Who is Ratatouille?
@john65pennington I’m thinking of the young parents who insist that their kids eat this or that,and who get all bent out of shape when the kid doesn’t WANT to eat this or that. The young parent’s food issues create food issues for the kid from the time they’re old enough to say their first word.

@noelleptc That’s sound advice, in my opinion. I took my kids likes and dislikes into consideration, but only in moderation. Like, I wouldn’t fix my child an entirely different meal than what I was cooking for the rest of the family, but I would modify a portion of it a little for the picky eater. Pull her portion out before I added onions or whatever.
Can you explain the movie to me?

Food is (or can be) art. It can bring joy and beauty into your life, it can be a gift, it can be the nucleus of a celebration. Food is a touchstone, a memory. For Jews, the Passover feast is a direct tactile, gustatory and olfactory memory of their ancestors. For Chinese, offering food is considered the most basic respect and courtesy. A popular Chinese greeting translates literally to “have you eaten?” For Americans, turkey roasting on Thanksgiving is a time to be thankful for the harvest, remember grandma, and reflect on the nation’s history (and wonder who will win the football game).
Contrast that now with a life with only water and canned dog food (or whatever would just meet your nutritional needs) to eat. In the process you remove every one of Grandma’s recipes. Every family Sunday dinner together. Every holiday dinner. Every valentine’s day treat, the strawberries dipped in chocolate. Every ethnic encounter—the Italian restaurant with the checkered tablecloths that Billy Joel sings about, the Mexican cantina with the mariachis singing, The sushi bar with the spicy wasabi. The fresh apples you picked off the tree in the orchard this fall.
Life without these things? no thanks.

Okay, maybe i misunderstood your question.

Our daughter, when she was about 5 or 6 years old, refused to eat carrots. my wife, being thoroughly upset with her, made her sit at the kitchen table, until she ate her carrots. she sat their forever. around 10 pm, we again checked on her to make sure she was okay. her little head had fallen into her plate of carrots and she was sound asleep.

This was a first and a last for us and this form of discipline. some children, especially those born in March, are determined to have things their way.

My daughter is 42 now and loves carrots. go figure !

Have you heard of comfort food? For many it is comfort to eat and some it is their only activity. When it comes to picky children I give in to their tastes. I ask them to taste it and if they do not like it don’t force it on them. It is not hard to make something else if the child doesn’t want what the others are having. As a parent you know what they like and do not like.

This question got me thinking of food.

I started to cry.

@john65pennington When my son was four I took a trip out of state and left him with my husband for a week. My husband worked so I found a babysitter for him during the days. Well, after I got back I was cooking and the menu included green beans. When I went to dish some up for him he said (with that little lisp that I miss so much!) “No green beaths!! Don’t even menshun green beanth!!”
I said, “What? You like green beans!”
Then it came out that the babysitter had served green beans for lunch one day, and for whatever reason Chris hadn’t wanted to eat them. She made him sit at the table for a couple of hours…he never did eat them. He outlasted her and good for him. And that is how food issues are created out of absolutely nothing. I don’t know why people do things like that.
@Justmeaman I think it’s futile to try and get kids to even taste something. They’re already convinced they don’t like it, and getting them to taste it isn’t going to change their minds. Also, I would never fix something else for a kid. As I said, I would modify a portion of their dinner, but I’d never let them control me like that, by fixing something completely different! And if they said they just weren’t going to eat I’d say, “Ok. You can be excused from the table.”

Yep, food is a mixed bag.

It is ‘used’ as a social brace, for comfort, for survival, for recreation, as an art form.

It has evolved for centuries as anything but just a rote means of survival.

I agree that parents lend themsleves to setting up their kids for all manner of dysfunctional eating habits. My mother used to ply me with treats to assuage her guilt of being a working mom way back when most moms were still in the home.

I have had to examine my connections to sugar especially and how my mom helped set it up that way.

I always offered my daughter a big variety of choices as a small child and her eating habits are very diverse and well rounded as a young woman now.

There is little she does not like and, infact, it is funny as both her room mates are very picky and she complains about all the things they won’t eat. lol

I agree in letting a child choose his own diet, and, it has been proven that even a very young child, such as a toddler will, if left to their own devices, balance their diet accordingly if given the freedom.

I disagree with ever ‘forcing’ a child to eat anything,

Scrap the carrots and give them an apple, or other comparable food.

Power stuggles never work, thats why they are called power ‘struggles.’ lol

In a power struggle over food, which the kids can’t initiate without the parent’s participation, the kids always win.

@Dutchess_III

Yes they do! haha

Duchess III, keep those memories.

Food is far more than just stuff you put your mouth—it’s primal. It engages all our senses—sight, sound, taste, smell, touch… plus memory sense.

Now I understand why so many people link food and sex together. I could replace food in austinlad’s comment with sex.

Food comforts, it nourishes, it brings joy, it entertains, it fulfills. Food can be the manifestation of love (and the withholding of food or the forcing of food can be just the opposite). The smell and taste of food, or just the memory of it can conjer up intense, profound feelings. The scent of turkey roasting on Thanksgiving day instantly transports me back to my grandmother’s house 40 years ago. Just the thought of baked macaroni and cheese makes me think of shopping trips with my mother and brother to the “cafeteria” when we were really little. Going to the cafeteria was a huge treat to us kids way back when. And the sound of a Hamilton Beach mixer always makes me think of the malt shop in the mountains where our dad used to take us to on special outings. And how many of you get goosebumps at the scent of bacon frying and coffee boiling over an open campfire?

I have met a small number of people in my life who eat the same exact thing every single day of their life and they have no interest or desire to taste anything new. For them food is only sustenence. They neither like or dislike their meal, it’s just like breathing air, there’s no joy attached to it. I always feel sad for those people. It would be like hearing The Beatles and a Mozart symphony and the Stars and Stripes forever played by a marching band and Amazing Grace moaned out by a lone bagpiper and thinking that it all sounded the same, and worse yet, that they could live without it and not care.

I agree with @Austinlad. I’ll never forget where I was when I tasted the most delicious fresh peach, my first bite of fillet mignon or a sea scallop. The taste of apple dumplings or homemade beef vegetable soup transports me back to Mom’s kitchen.

I get the ‘clean your plate or you won’t leave the table’ bit. An older sister fought with Dad about that for years. She grew out of it, as did a neighbor child who ended up living on hot dogs and pizza for a couple of years when his parents gave up. Don’t most children?

And yes, there is the comfort food phenomenon. Several friends subscribe to it.

The emotional links to food don’t just occur for SOME people. They occur for ALL people. It’s just that for most people the connections don’t turn into negative patterns of behavior that people are struggling with…or so most of us would like to believe. I would debate you on it however because marketing and farm policy directly related to what and how we eat in the US as well as what kinds of food we eat and what is allowed to be added to them or what they are exposed to in terms of produce. That’s some heavy duty stuff right there. Living is dependent on food from birth and so there have been constant messages delivered about food that get logged onto the phenomenological maps of each and everyone of us. We are not just talking about appetite and taste or nutrional needs, but cultural norms and what gets related in the production of food at every step of the way. Think for just a moment on what you have been told about something as simple as a potato or rice and all the messages related to that. Every thought usually has a companion emotion associated with it. We have messages about meals, times of meals, whom we eat with, when and where we eat, what we eat, in what proportions, and at least a hundred other things. And each and eveyone of those messages makes you feel something.

I come from generations of Americans who use food to treat, soothe, bribe and also punish. It starts in childhood, for sure. My grandparents raised me, both of them having been young kids during The Great Depression and dedicated to making sure their kids and grandkids would want for nothing. That meant always having treats on hand, a table full of choices for all three meals, desserts and stressing how those things meant security (no hunger), love (choices!) and spoiling (as much as you want). Punishment was being kept from the food.

I think it’s like this for a lot of people that they feel poor or neglected if they can’t eat nonstop or sample everything available. My family used to say not to ever ask for food when a guest because that somehow meant you weren’t treated right at home. As a host then you would put on a big spread of anything and everything you had, all the best to offer. Can you imagine little kids now having to be asked at least three times before they’d accept a snack or food? As a kid then everyone I knew was like that, we were always hungry like locusts!

Great Answers all! @Kardamom I appreciate good food, but…it’s not like I eat lunch and then start planning dinner, like so many people I work with do. The only time I feel any particular emotion is when I’m really REALLY hungry (which doesn’t happen that often because I’m an American) and I finally eat, which is usually two or three hours after I started feeling hungry. Then I feel a rush of well being and satisfaction. But those times are few and far between. I also appreciate carefully prepared home cooked foods, like at thanksgiving, and nice restaurant meals. But, again, those feelings are few and far between, whereas in my experience so many people talk about what they’re having for dinner every day, right after they’ve finished lunch and they express excitement and say things like “It is soooo good!” Well, I can’t even think about dinner when I’ve just eaten lunch! So, some of it I understand. I guess it’s the “my life revolves around food” part that I don’t understand.

Funny…I cleaned out the fridge about a week ago. Threw away about 8 or 10 containers of leftovers that were no good. Fridge looked empty, but it wasn’t. It had milk, flour, eggs, butter, pickles, stuff like that in it. But almost immediately my husband began complaining that we were “out of food!” It’s like, “If the fridge isn’t full of stuff (even if it’s stuff you can’t eat) you’re out of food!”

I guess I feel lucky that I have been exposed to a lot of wonderful food over my lifetime, first with my family, my mother is an excellent cook and both of my grandmothers and my aunts were/are great cooks, then with friends I have met over the years. I used to be a very picky eater when I was a little kid, but when I became an adult, I actively tried to change that. I learned how to cook, tried new foods at ethnic restaurants to which I was un-acustomed, I tried things that co-workers or friends made that I had never tasted. My enjoyment of food grew because of this. My world doesn’t revolve around food, but food, just like a whole host of other things, is a very important aspect of it. Food is, of course, sustenence. But just like I can’t imagine not having great enjoyment with regard to food, I also can’t imagine engaging in relations with my spouse and just doing it and not thinking about it in wonderful terms or looking forward to it or planning to do it again and just reveling in all of the joy and passion. There are lots of things like that in my life, not just food and whoopie, there’s music and art and nature and humor and friendship. Maybe I just experience life on a more intense level. I can’t imagine not living that way. In fact I wouldn’t consider it living so much as simply existing. With regard to thinking about what I’m going to make for dinner right after I eat lunch, I do that all the time and so do a lot of my co-workers. We have to, we try to make wholesome great tasting meals while saving money and not wasting food. So I plan ahead and get and share ideas with like minded people. Plus, cooking is fun and a great stress releaser. I hope you have something in your life that gives you that kind of joy.

I’ve been thinking about this. Food is as vital to us as air and water, but we run out of food on a regular basis, whereas we don’t run out of air and water on a regular basis. At least, if you’re not a Chilean miner. I imagine that when those guys got their first whiff of fresh air, and first drink of fresh water, it set up physical reactions in their bodies that created the emotion of joy in their minds. So…I understand better. But I keep myself hydrated and aerated at about the same rate I keep myself caloriated (I know, no such word) so I don’t get too excited about any of it. But sometimes…Crab Legs! Joe’s Crab Shack! Medium Rare KC Strip! Yes, good food is good. But mostly I eat mediocre food…on a regular basis.

@Kardamom I have a lot of things besides food that gives me joy….writing, reading, thinking, camping, hiking, precious moments with my my kids, and now my grandkids…. :) Joy, laughter….put it this way. I’ll be more likely to write about precious moments from when my kids were little, 20 years ago, than a dinner I had 20 years ago. Those are the things that are precious to me. Although….I do remember this one time at Red Lobster in 1996…Oh, Yum! I musta been hungry for it to taste that good!

I’m glad to hear that you do have other things, besides food, that make you happy and joyful. You said that most of the food you eat is mediocre? Why is that? Is it because you just don’t like the taste of most food, or is it because you don’t cook or your S/O doesn’t cook? Just curious, because I rarely have a bad meal: one prepared by me or relatives or restaurant meals. In fact, I’m just about to leave to go have Indian food at a new restaurant that one of my friends raved about. I’m salivating right now just thinking about it and also thinking about how much fun it is to share a meal with a good friend.

@Kardamom Mainly because I work. Eating is something I do on a work schedule. It doesn’t leave time for nice restaurant meals or home cooked food, unless it’s leftovers I grab out of the fridge to heat up in the microwave at work. Eating is just something I do because I have to, and at work I’m on the computer with one hand and eating with the other. On the weekends, however, especially Sunday, I’ll get busy with a big, family style meal. It’s a lot of work, though! On Friday or Saturday night we might go to a nice restaurant. My life doesn’t revolve around what I’m going to eat next, though.

Neural connections invoking memories.

I guess I don’t got no memories, then Matt! Don’t ask me how I remember how to do my algebra!

Intuition is great !

So’s guessin’, Matt!