Good For What Ails Ya

The connection between food and emotional well-being is complex, difficult to measure, and a critical part of being human.

By James Norton of The Heavy Table

A few years ago, I got sick. It wasn't anything dramatic. It may have been a mild flu, or a harsh cold, or a really mellow case of COVID that wasn't registering on our tests. (Which wouldn't be a first.)

I remember feeling not just physically bad, but emotionally lousy as well. Lonely, tired, isolated, frustrated - the energy I normally had was gone, and my life was, for the time being, reduced to a miscellaneous pile of symptoms (with a real emphasis on coughing and wheezing), plus whatever low-impact media I could watch from bed.

At this particular moment, my wife Becca decided to try making me chicken matzo ball soup. Force me to describe matzo ball soup and all the words I would use would be surprisingly emotion-centered: caring, warm, healing, comfortable. Home. 

It's just soup, but it comes with a rich context: someone who wants me to feel better is making something from scratch that feels custom-designed to take care of me physically. And that means it's something that's also custom-designed to take care of me emotionally. It's not just a soup, it's a symbol that at least one other human being out there has my back in a tangible way. 

It turned out that Becca's ability to make chicken matzo ball soup outpaced my hopes: this stuff was rich, soothing, beautifully balanced, and pretty much the platonic ideal of the dish. It's possible I've had this kind of soup at this quality level before (at the Saint Paul restaurant Meritage, where the chef Russell Klein is famous for it) but then again, I feel like Becca's may well have been better.

But she had an unfair advantage: when someone you love makes you something you love to eat at a time when you're hurting, it makes a different kind of impact. I'm not going to claim that the soup cured me, but it turned my attitude around, and that by itself is no small thing when you're in an illness-fueled funk.

My matzo ball soup may be your empanadas, or pho, or tibs, or paella, or spaghetti Bolognese, or carnitas tacos, or grits, or whatever you want to insert into this particular space. It's something that someone can give you that you can use to fill a need that's as emotional as it is physical and, when you're done eating, you feel better in a complete and well-rounded way.

The mechanism at work here is both totally obvious and incredibly difficult to quantify. Food is just fuel - until it isn't. The right food can be a lifeline to a human connection, to a treasured place, to a foundational memory, to a refuge of mental health. 

And while you can't eat our problems away... at least not for very long, or very reliably - the right food at the right time can swing the difference between feeling terrible and feeling like you're on the road to a better place. That's powerful leverage when you're on the skids and even a small improvement can help you reorganize your whole collapsed house of mental cards. 

Science has taken a crack at measuring this effect* (check out this precis of a study in Psychological Science) but beyond suggesting that there's really something there, it's not an easy thing to put into ones and zeroes. Literature might actually do a better job of getting a handle on the connection: if you're even passingly familiar with Proust's madeleine from Remembrance of Things Past, you're familiar with the idea that the taste of food is a key that unlocks a treasure chest of memories and feelings.

It's interesting that a recovery food that's meant to pull you out of a tailspin isn't the same as a celebration food. I absolutely love to house a cheesy piece of pizza or a pint of good ice cream with caramel sauce, but when I'm on my last legs, they're the last thing I need or want. 

Something with substance that tastes balanced and "clean," whatever that means, is absolutely key. Local and/or organic food is especially nice in this context, because I swear to God, I can feel that particular sort of love when I'm on the ropes for real. A pile of fat and sugar might be an easy answer, but when it's time to halt a skid, it's also the wrong answer.

And it's also not science. Not yet, and not exactly. But when things have gone really south, it's exactly the sort of last-ditch effort that sometimes turns the whole ship around.