There’s a reason you don’t reach for a salad when your world falls apart. You reach for the thing that feels like hope.
Psychologists have a name for it: social surrogacy. A 2011 study out of the University at Buffalo (Troisi & Gabriel, Psychological Science) had people write about a fight with a close friend, then eat a comfort food from their childhood. Afterward, they felt less lonely — measurably so, almost as if a friend had actually shown up. Comfort food didn’t just fill a stomach. It stood in for a relationship, and relationships are where a lot of our hope gets stored.
Last year, in the piece on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, I made the case that food sits on the bottom rung — the foundation everything else gets built on. But this study suggests it’s doing more than holding the pyramid up. It’s smuggling hope into the floors above it too, the ones about love and belonging that are supposed to come later.
A bowl of soup can’t pay your rent or heal a friendship. But apparently, your brain doesn’t always know that. It tastes hope anyway.
Comfort food gets a bad reputation in a culture obsessed with clean eating and discipline. But treating a hard day with a bowl of your mom’s soup, or whatever yours is, might be one of the more psychologically sound things you can do.
Hope doesn’t always arrive as a plan or a pep talk. Sometimes hope arrives reheated, in a pot, tasting exactly like it did when someone else was taking care of you.
Question
What’s the one dish that takes you straight back to feeling like everything is going to be okay, and who made it for you?
A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world. Read in 50 states in the US and 91 countries throughout the World.
