Moreish E-Book

Matt Buttrick

• Herausgeber: Flint
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 420

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Explore the impact of words in menu construction alongside the power of comfort food; why the first bite is not always with the eyes; and how the worlds of sex, symbolism and animal instinct are simmering just beneath the surface in all of us. Continually eye-opening and perceptive, often witty and entertaining, Moreish sets a place for persuasive packaging, in-your-face pop songs, underhand menu writing and over-the-top advertising. It demonstrates that, while we often feel fully in control of our food choices, the opposite is almost definitely true. If you've ever eaten food, this book is for you.

Leseprobe

First published 2025

FLINT is an imprint of The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.flintbooks.co.uk

© Matt Buttrick, 2025

The right of Matt Buttrick to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 499 4

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

Contents

Introduction: Never Just ‘Food’

Part 1: Emotional Triggers

1    Are You Eating Comfortably?

2    Déjà Food

3    Good Enough to Tweet

Part 2: Brain Tricks

4    The Pen is Mightier than the Fork

5    A Feast for the Senses

6    A Soup of Symbolism

Part 3: Social Influences

7    With Relish!

8    Forbidden Fruit

9    Breaking Bread

10  Light My Fire

Epilogue

After-Dinner Reading and Viewing

Notes

For Rory

Introduction

Never Just ‘Food’

Chances are you probably eat food – it’s a fairly long-running trend in human history. Fast forward to the middle of the last century and American food writer M.F.K. Fisher famously declared ‘First we eat, then we do everything else’ – nothing could be truer today.

Nowadays, we live in an era where food has become a national pastime and cultural obsession. From fanatical bloggers and TV shows to rapid takeaways and celebrity cookbooks, it’s difficult to think of a time when our love affair with food has ever been stronger or our appetite hungrier. In just the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of street food, foraging, veganism, fast food gourmetisation, cupcake crazes, kimchi and meal kit subscriptions. Startups battle multinational corporations for a share of the weekly shop, drones stand by to parachute pizza, while the restaurant and casual dining sectors have been forced to rethink everything. In the Western world, immediacy is now a reality for almost any food you’d care to think of, and choice is everywhere, from petrol stations and corner shops to food delivery services and on-demand apps.

In fact, according to the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, the average person makes more than 200 decisions about food every day, many of them unconsciously.1 But what is really influencing us at these moments? We think we choose to eat because it tastes good or is right in front of us; we are masters of our dining destiny, in conscious control at all times. But the truth is that we are driven by a far more powerful set of unconscious desires. A potent mix of social systems, childhood nostalgia, deliberate marketing and defence mechanisms all lie in wait as we scan the menu or supermarket shelf for our next meal.

This book is about lifting the lid on the hidden drivers behind what we choose to eat. It uncovers the invisible marriage between food and psychology, and the deeper motivations behind those 200 food decisions we make every day. You will be able to explore the influence of words in menu construction alongside the power of comfort food, why the first bite is not always with the eyes and how the worlds of sex, symbolism and animal instinct are simmering just beneath the surface in all of us. We cast the net far and wide and learn that while we often feel fully in control of our food choices, the opposite is almost definitely true.

To help us on our journey, we chew the fat with Greek philosophers, food tasters, neuroscientists and jazz pianists. We set a place for hidden semiotics, colourful linguists, underhand menu writing and over-the-top advertising, from primal man to Mad Men via Netflix shows and dopamine fixes, it’s quite the feast. So, if you’re interested in how we find ourselves eating what we do and uncovering some of the real reasons why we order it, serve it, pick it up or click on it, then this book is for you.

At its most basic, food is simple to understand and not open to interpretation. Its primary function is to provide nourishment, and this comes in the form of proteins, vitamins, fats, carbohydrates, fibres and minerals. It is these nutrients, plus a few more chemical compounds, that keep us ticking along from one day to the next. But looking at food only in this reductionist way would make for a rather short book. Instead, we need to delve a little deeper and in doing so, it soon becomes clear that food is no longer simply a collection of inert things between our knife and fork; it’s way more fun than that. As American sociologist Gary Alan Fine puts it, ‘We are entangled in our meals’.2 Let’s untangle them a little, shall we?

Whose lunch is it anyway?

Throughout our story we will look at the influences outside the body but also the hidden urges inside that are calling many of the culinary shots and casting electrical spells throughout our brains and blood. There is no shortage of lead characters here, but one that often muscles in to make a name for itself is dopamine.

I like to think of this chemical messenger as John Belushi’s character in the 1978 film Animal House, in particular, the scene where he gorges himself in the canteen just before he instigates the mother of all food fights. When it comes to food and pleasure, dopamine is your hungry, ravenous friend, whispering ‘more, more, more’, and represents a common ally leading us into temptation. Alongside serotonin production and the release of endorphins, there are some pretty strong yet hidden forces streaming through our blood stream when thoughts turn to lunch.

Meanwhile, good food and good sex share more than just bedroom antics (more of that in Chapter 7). Both are connected into the limbic system of the brain that controls our memory and emotions, while also triggering hormones that signal comfort, reward and craving. It reminds us how powerful an understanding of the body’s biology is in what we choose to eat, and how everything we consume has direct consequences for how we think, feel and act.

If we leave science class and walk down the hall to the psychology department, things open up further. Semioticians have long noted that food assumes a wealth of meaning beyond simple nourishment. It can satisfy our social, psychological and status needs, help us construct our cultural identities and connect us to our friends, families, homes and cities. Capable of warmly bonding us to our origins or delivering a much-needed escape route from them, food has the ability to underpin vast cultures and unite entire nations.

Always symbolic of other capacities, eating can also be sinful and even illegal, an act of rebellion for some and a tribal requirement for others. Even before a bite is taken, food says something powerful about all of us: a bright signal beamed out every time we get hungry and an indicator of anything from cultural capital, stature and class to ethnic and racial identity.

What we eat, how we eat it and where has always been used to mark our place in the world versus others’. In a country like China, the introduction of international food brands in recent years has elevated food as a status symbol for the middle classes. So, while traditional delicacies such as bird’s nest soup or abalone have always been used to signal status, it is now the likes of Fiji Water and Godiva chocolates riding into town that are used to display finesse and social know-how. In Chapter 3, we dive headfirst into the excesses of banqueting and the rise of Instagrammers to explore how strongly the influence on what we eat is governed by the desired reaction in others. It’s a chapter for the exhibitionists, minimalists and anyone who has ever tweeted a photo of their starter.

Are food choices also governed by deeper, more hidden motivations, behaviours that aren’t waved like flags for all to see but lie far more concealed, even from ourselves? On the surface, it can be clear how we eat; some of us have a repulsion to what others believe to be divine. Craving and disgust can sit around the same dinner table and often do (especially if you share your mealtimes with children). One man’s meat is another man’s poison, as the proverb goes. But beyond such physical reactions, also joining us at the dinner table are invisible guests. To your left meet your unconscious mind and to your right, your subconscious desires. Both are hungry but give little away when asked. Throughout the book, we’ll get them revealing their secrets.

As you can probably tell by now, a lot goes on behind the scenes before we snack on, pig out or polish off something. We’re unwittingly ushered towards decisions by unseen forces, at times quietly guided like an invisible waiter and at others fully ambushed without warning. Some of you may already be examining your own behaviours and experiences; others may be simply starting to develop cravings for something to nibble (it’s OK, reading about food can do that).

Without further ado, I can see starter plates are being cleared away; let’s proceed to the main dining room. More of the real reasons why we choose the food we do are waiting patiently and there are plenty of courses. Let’s spill some beans.

Part 1

Emotional Triggers

What really makes us buy the ice cream, caviar, crisps or breakfast cereal we do? Is it the functional aspects like pack size, price and flavour, or do they satisfy a more subconscious need?

The chapters in Part 1 explore how underlying and often undeclared emotional need states can work wonders on our next meal choice. There’s a phrase in the marketing world about logic opening the minds, but emotions opening up the wallet, and when we set out to map these need states, our different motivations are often revealed: the need to fit in, versus the need to stand apart or the need to feel superior versus the need to feel kind to others. Through this lens, the average supermarket is not a building with shelves of wheat, rice, fruit and meat. It doesn’t sell packets of minerals, nutrients and amino acids. Instead, a weekly shop is a trip into the subconscious.

As the saying goes, ‘don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle’.

1

Are You Eating Comfortably?

The Saturday detention bell rings. It’s 1985 and five high-school kids sit bored out of their brains longing to be anywhere but in class. They are all there for different misdemeanours, each in their own world of disbelief and displeasure.

In John Hughes’ movie The Breakfast Club, we learn a lot about the human condition, about friendship, rebellion, acceptance and coming of age. A film almost entirely set in a deserted high-school library on a Saturday, we see the stage set for the day’s confinement as each kid tries to cope with imprisonment in their own way. For some, it’s a familiar, almost regular part of school, for others, it’s an entirely new experience, and as the day slowly builds for each one we see the boredom, the introspection, the friction and the freak-outs play out.

But one scene has always stuck out for me, has always been my favourite, and that’s the lunch scene. Here we see each student produce their sustenance for the day and it’s a perfect filmic way to bring the characters together and deftly split them all apart. It shows us their commonalities (everyone gets hungry) and their stark differences via the type of food they have, the suggestion of who made it and the routine they go through to eat it. Well-to-do Claire has sushi complete with soy sauce, napkins and chopsticks. Regular guy Brian has regular soup, regular apple juice and regular peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Sporty Andrew has a comedic quantity of sandwiches, cookies, chips and fruit. While misfit Allison flings the original contents of her sandwich at the ceiling and proceeds to pour copious amounts of sugar and breakfast cereal onto her bread between slugs of full-fat red coke. Finally, bad boy John apparently has nothing at all. All in their own worlds, all bemused by each other’s lunch rituals.

As I say, I love this scene for the sheer comedy but also because it really helps frame the very idea of food as comfort. The students are at a low point and their lunch routine is finally a place to retreat into, a moment of familiarity, a moment of home, a moment when the rules are finally their own. It’s a brilliant example we can all identify with, where food itself can make us feel better and less alone, even when the outside world and external environment is beyond our control.

In many ways, eating has always played this role in our lives. We may be sitting in detention, stuck in a foreign land, lost at sea or even up in space, but our fragile bodies and minds seem to long for composure and the familiar. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once spoke about how food nurtures our souls, and as we’ll see, the idea that food is eaten for solace as much as fuel seems to be a core part of being human. It sets the book off on one of its core ideas: food is way more than simple consumption, and for this chapter, it’s a kind of therapy that comes in many shapes and sizes, portions and packages.

The actual phrase ‘comfort food’ has not been around for particularly long and originated in America during the mid-1960s when a writer for the Palm Beach Post reportedly coined it in an article about what stressed adults would turn to.1 A decade later, the term appeared to become further popularised in a 1977 Washington Post article by Phyllis Richman, who used the phrase to specifically describe the reason we turn to shrimp and grits.2 The topic was finally set to print with Judith Olney’s 1979 book Comforting Food, which ultimately ushered in the 1980s as a decade when consumers once again recognised the feel-good home cooking of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Serving as a much-needed antidote to a new era of speed and stress, the idea of warming, slower food was lovingly turned to, and by the 1990s American menus were full of classic dishes again. A trend that of course has remained to this day on each side of the Atlantic, the modern ubiquity of mac ’n’ cheese alone on menus is testament in itself.

Care packages

So, let’s dig into the power of comfort food and some of the reasons why it’s such a big driver in the foods we turn to again and again. One of my favourite writers on the subject is Anneli Rufus, and while working at an advertising agency in London, I was exposed to a quote that gives a really visual way to think about this area: ‘Food is a fort we build around us’.3 It’s such a vivid thing to say, isn’t it? Barricading ourselves away from the world, sheltering behind walls of warm insulation, danger, for the meantime, is thankfully held at bay. It’s all there in our scene from The Breakfast Club as the characters construct edible sanctuaries on their desk and retreat into them.

So, we use comforting foods to block out the outside world, but we’re also using foods to soothe what’s going on inside us. The School of Life, an international group of thinkers and philosophers launched by Alain de Botton, refers to food as having deep therapeutic potential that can ease the parts of our minds that have slipped into a fractious child. They talk about self-nurture and how steaming bowls of soup can bring us down from despair, lend us hope and regulate the storms in our minds. They even reframe kitchens as ‘psychotherapeutic chemists’, dispensing remedies for our tired souls.4

For those of you who have witnessed grumpy children, you’ll know that the cause is usually tiredness, thirst or hunger, and of course, we adults are no different when energies start to flag. So, if we are to comfort our distracted minds, the right foods often have the ability to take the edge off and bring us back into balance.

Although inevitably philosophical, I did once read somewhere that there’s no amount of tears that a drive-through burger at 5 a.m. can’t dry. And I know I’ve certainly trekked miles out of my way in the middle of the night to pick up bagels in London’s Brick Lane because nothing else would quite help me make it through.

A solitary pilgrimage is often the only way to reach the right comfort food to relieve our hearts and minds, but sometimes we are provided with these care packages on the house to keep our spirits up. It’s been argued that the rise of personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s led to a significant change of working patterns as employees started working longer hours, huddled in cubicles and encouraged to chase more targets. To offset the increased stress and to keep the hamsters on the wheel, companies started introducing free office snacks and magic vending machines at no charge! The ulterior motive? Food was being used to artificially supplement the energy needed to stay on top: keep eating, keep working, stay happy! Nowadays, nearly one in four Americans receive free snacks in the workplace and in the advertising industry it is still common practice for senior management to order huge amounts of pizza to ‘encourage’ employees to participate in boring meetings or stay late to work on a pitch.5

As we’re seeing, consuming comforting food has always been a thing for us. But that need was pulled into much sharper focus as the Covid pandemic joined our lives in 2020. In an article named ‘Savoury Comfort Food for Uncertain Times’, global market research company Mintel observed that during those challenging days consumers were seeking out, often unconsciously, more foods that enhanced their mood or alleviated anxiety.6

Those needs started to play out in the kitchen as we suddenly had the time to create new versions of comfort food for the first time. According to the BBC, the UK’s top ten recipe searches in 2020 included beef bourguignon, school cake (simple vanilla sponge cake with icing and sprinkles), homemade KFC, American pancakes, Wagamama katsu curry and IKEA meatballs.7 It’s a revealing list, probably most notable for the universal desire to recreate branded favourites at home. Soon, a host of companies were trying to pivot and take advantage of the pandemic trend for comfort eating. Food industry advice prompted businesses and brands to look at simpler and more classic dishes. Seasonings brands such as herbs and spices should ‘flag their role’ in recreating in-demand dinners, while condiments like ketchup should cuddle up to family favourites like never before.

High-end restaurants even got in on the game, pivoting their offerings to serve a more needy national mindset. Many embraced classic takeaway fodder, including the Michelin-starred Ynyshir in Wales, which began offering kebabs, a pizza takeaway was laid on by Lyle’s in London (no stranger to the World’s 50 Best Restaurants Awards), Claridge’s jumped into the fried chicken game and Noma loosened its fine Nordic cuisines to dish out good old cheeseburgers.8

As the world opened back up, there were also surprise winners. Wimpy, an ageing fast-food chain restaurant, survived the pandemic and the decline of the UK high street with its comforting familiarity that reminded people of their childhood – a powerful force we’ll pull up a chair with in Chapter 2.

Interestingly, now the pandemic has passed, the industry perspective has also evolved. When asked if comfort food was to shape the future, Suzy Badaracco, president of Culinary Tides, a food think tank, was less optimistic. In a webinar on trends shaping the food industry for 2022–23, she stated that comfort food was definitely not the place to grow a business, claiming that as vaccines had made consumers more confident, comfort was being replaced by experimentation.9 No longer were forts of food being built to protect us or care packages being ordered. We were emerging from our caves and looking for something pleasurable to lift our moods in a different way – a much more carefree motivation we get stuck into in Chapter 7.

Not sure if I’m dead, hungover or just hungry

The pandemic encouraged us to eat more carbohydrate-rich foods to try to feel better emotionally, and some have even called this a form of self-medication. But perhaps this raises the idea of all those mini-pandemics that happen all year, every year in houses across the world; the days when we can’t get out of bed, let alone face work and other people.

When sick days come knocking, our food choices become highly specific as we slowly reach for a helping hand. With collagen and protein from meat and bones mixed with the anti-inflammatory effects of onions and vegetables, chicken soup, or ‘Jewish penicillin’ as it’s often called, is a go-to medicine the world over. The winning combination also makes friends with the microbes in our guts, in turn helping readjust our hormone levels and boosting our mood. Makes you want some chicken soup whether you’re sick or not, doesn’t it?

Depending on where you come from, what we reach for when we’re under the weather naturally changes. In the UK, it’s stews, soups, broths and omelettes that we hope someone will bring us. For people with a Chinese origin, it’s often all about the congee. The super-simple dish consists of only two ingredients and is simply made by cooking rice for longer than usual in more water than usual. Over time, the grains are broken down into a smooth creamy rice porridge to which meats, vegetables and eggs can be added. Its thick and starchy result is eaten all over Asia for its gentleness and ease of creation when fighting off common colds and days of ill ease. As Jenny G. Zhang, a journalist for eater.com, once put it, ‘When my tastebuds are dulled, there’s a soothing blandness to congee, primarily satisfying in its gloopy texture on the tongue – as if I’m eating baby food again – and its solid comfort’.10

Of course, sometimes our broken bodies and spirits are a result of self-infliction. As the party cousin to the regular sick day, hangovers have their own rules and rituals when it comes to which food will make us feel human again. Most of us have been there: splitting headaches, dizziness and self-loathing, all washing around our blood and brain. Experienced participants often develop food strategies for the morning after, while some almost subscribe to a dependable set menu they tick off throughout the following day.

I used to work with the brand Lucozade, one of the UK’s original energy drinks, and the thing nobody was allowed to talk about in meetings was its central role in the hangover kitbag. Tasty, refreshing and packed with glucose, its go-to status was only rivalled by the ‘red ambulance’ of full-fat Coca-Cola. Instead, we had to tell a more generic energy story in advertising, but everyone secretly knew what we were really selling.

There are definitely some interesting approaches around the world if anyone is looking for inspiration. In the Czech Republic, they are partial to pickled sausages called Utopenci. In Puerto Rico, they go for Sancocho, a beefy stew with lots of starchy vegetables such as yucca, plantains and pumpkin. While in Uganda, their morning kick-starter is called Katago, in which the country’s main crop of matooke (a type of green banana) is cooked, often mashed up then sprinkled with spiced cow or goat intestines and stomach. I thought these things were meant to calm the digestion, but there you go.

It’s impossible to talk about hangovers and offal without a courteous nod to Fergus Henderson. As head chef at London’s St John restaurant, he has spearheaded, or perhaps revived, the concept of nose-to-tail eating, in which typically discarded cuts of meat (think pigs’ trotters, bone marrow and ducks’ hearts) are reclaimed for the dining room. A few years ago, he and his staff invented the ‘Hair of the dog’ doughnut with a medicinal filling featuring Fernet Branca, an Italian herbal liqueur containing twenty-seven different herbs. Fergus’ father did apparently issue a serious warning that although it was a useful pick-me-up to take the edge off the morning, be sure not to let the cure become the cause.11

On a more whimsical note, Belfast twins Alan and Gary Keery were inspired to create the Cereal Killer Café during a hangover wandering around Shoreditch. Pizza and burgers didn’t appeal, instead they hankered after sugary cereal. Within twelve months, their craving had turned into a real café selling over fifty boxes of cereal from all over the world plus delicacies such as cornflake chicken and cereal milk ice cream.

Eating on autopilot

There’s something that all the examples we’ve talked about have in common, be that sitting on the sofa on a Friday night, negotiating a wretched hangover, stuck inside a pandemic or sat in school detention on a Saturday – and that something has actually more to do with our brains than our taste buds. For those of you who may have read Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, you may be familiar with the idea that we human beings think and make decisions in two key ways. There’s System 1 thinking, which is instinctive and quick, and System 2, which is slower and more calculated, and it’s widely accepted that we make most of our daily decisions using System 1.12

Let’s give it a try with this classic example. Spell your full name out loud letter by letter. Pretty easy right? That’s your System 1 brain completing the task. Now do it again, but this time say the letters backwards. It’s much harder, and that’s our System 2 brain being asked to kick in and work it out. System 2 tasks are those harder things we’re often asked to do like fill in a form, listen carefully to directions or weigh up two similar deals on a supermarket shelf, and the truth is, we don’t like to think like this because it takes up way too much energy. As Daniel Kahneman puts it, ‘Thinking is to humans what swimming is to cats. They can do it if they have to, but they’d prefer not to.’

So, to avoid swimming like a cat and keeping life easy, we wander around all day using our System 1 brain to simplify decisions in a selection of ways. One such example is our love for pattern recognition. Here, we’re scanning the horizon looking for things that are familiar, and the quicker we see something we recognise the better. Add to this the idea that System 1 thinking becomes even more dominant when you’re short on time, tired or hungry and its role at dinner time when different choices are offered becomes clear. You grab the bags of crisps that you recognise in the closest corner shop because life’s complicated enough without having to narrow down 100 snacks staring back at you.

The soft touch

Everything about comfort food is soothing and, more often than not, that’s a texture thing. While snacks are often brittle, such as crisps, crackers or pretzels, the foods we turn to for solace are often lovely and soft. We may be talking about creamy, silky and whipped, or thick, slow and unctuous, but whatever the type of softness, the common factor seems to be easy to eat. In fact, it’s even been pointed out that comfort foods often require little chewing, and their flavour profiles are often bland enough to lull your taste buds nicely off to sleep. You’ll notice popping candy doesn’t appear on many top comfort food lists.

Instead, foods that are super easy to think about and equally easy to physically swallow come to mind, such as gnocchi, katsu curry, stews and risotto. We’ve heard about the wonder of congee, and I once saw a tweet stating that the soup was basically just tea made from food. But beyond simply being soft to start with, something else is at play when we put certain foods in our mouths.

Barb Stuckey is an American food and flavour scientist who advises companies how to formulate new products so they taste the best they can, and she talks about the wonderful way in which food changes states in your mouth. Ice cream, butter, chocolate and cheese all magically morph from solid to liquid state, from rigid to pliable, from substantial to velvety.13 Our bodies have evolved to spot that this metamorphosis indicates the presence of fat and the precious calories that follow, making these food experiences even more magnetic.

The world is full of wonderful accounts relating to foods of this kind and how they can hold a disproportionate influence over people. In Nora Ephron’s autobiographical novel Heartburn, she sums up the power that can come from the humble potato:

In the end, I always want potatoes. Mashed potatoes. Nothing like mashed potatoes when you’re feeling blue. Nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter, and methodically adding a thin cold slice of butter to every forkful.14

If Nora’s account was a window into a starchy love affair, then Friedrich Nietzsche’s revelation in 1877 was love at first sight. The nineteenth-century German philosopher was travelling through Italy when he was suddenly compelled to write to his mother claiming he had discovered the meaning of human happiness. He had not met someone, but something, and that something was the perfect risotto.15

Clearly, there is something special about these soft comfort foods we get attached to, and there is often a deeply universal element to these favourites; they are often real crowd pleasers. American chef David Scribner once said in an interview with the Washington Post that when creating comfort food, proper restraint was needed.16 This wasn’t the time to express the chef’s personality and get all clever and avant-garde; the food must be plain and simple. There is a modesty to many of these foods; they are not complicated and that’s the joy. In the 2015 film Burnt, starring Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller, the two high-end chefs meet in a Burger King and debate the cuisine on offer. While she is horrified by the excessive display of fat, salt and cheap cuts of meat, he responds by suggesting she’d just described the most classic of French peasant dishes.

In the UK we have a real crowd pleaser in the shape of chips (fries in the USA). They’re pretty much our national food and whether you have them at home, buy them from an inner-city McDonald’s, sit down to a portion that’s triple-cooked by a fancy gastropub or walk along the coast with a bag fresh from a proper chippy, most of us will be very happy indeed. As George Orwell put it in The Road to Wigan Pier, ‘When you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit “tasty”… Let’s have three pennorth of chips!’17 Across the pond, it’s all about the macaroni cheese. Having remained on the list of America’s top ten comfort foods for decades, it’s a deeply ingrained part of both food and family culture.

The other softness that lots of comfort foods have in common is that they are simply not angular. They are not jagged in construction or delicately built on the plate in front of us. They are certainly not hard to negotiate and are often more suited to the gentle curvature of a spoon than the blades and prongs of a knife and fork. In fact, when I reach for true comfort food, I very rarely need to cut or slice any part of the dish, let alone bother with side plates and ceremony. It’s one bowl, two hands, table optional. This is perhaps why this type of eating experience is often considered the antidote to fancy gastronomy, modernist or molecular cuisine – it takes a thankfully small amount of brain power to conceive and even less to consume.

There is, of course, a time and a place for full-contact dining that feels more like negotiating an assault course – a time when we want to be stimulated and surprised – but feeling blue on a rainy Sunday night may not be that moment. As food writer Phyllis Richman once said, we are talking about food that is quiet in its mood, and that brings us nicely onto a star food in the comfort space.

Grease is the word

In the summer of 2010, I started working at a new advertising agency in central London. It was an agency based in the heart of the city’s diamond trade in Hatton Garden. But I wasn’t handed fine jewels to think about; instead, I was to work on the appetisingly titled food sector known as ‘yellow fats’. In plain English, this means foods from the dairy industry, and while colleagues of mine were busy working on butters and spreads I was asked to work at the more solidified end of fats that were yellow. I was welcome to cheese, and more specifically, a cheddar brand called Cathedral City. As the number one brand in the market, it was incredibly well known and available in every supermarket in the country. Naturally, our team spent a large amount of time looking at and thinking about cheese and although I hadn’t worked this closely on a cheddar brand before, I was immediately hooked.

What did I love about it so much? Well, truth be told, the experience ultimately led to the book you’re holding right now. On the surface, working on a cheese brand may sound a little uninteresting – mundane in fact. But I quickly came to learn and love all the hidden human insights and rich drivers that happened to people when this everyday product came into their lives.

As you’ll see throughout the book, why we’re so motivated to eat cheese pops up regularly. Its relationship with our childhood and mother’s milk is explored in Chapter 2 as we yearn for nostalgia (cheese has been referred to as nursery food for adults). While in Chapter 5, we explore why the sight of it is so appealing, and in Chapter 7, we talk about its unique ability to drive pleasure and the claim that it’s actually a dessert in disguise!

But when it comes to cheese as a powerful comfort food, we find it sits at an almost holy place between a feel-good and a tastes-good experience. As a journey through the mouth, we receive a hit of savoury dynamism which snaps its fingers and focuses the senses. We then wait with anticipation as the initial bite gives way to an unctuous rear mouth reward as rich fats are released when the cheese melts across our tongue. If that wasn’t enough, the more we chew, the creamier the experience and the more soothed we become. I’m feeling more relaxed and serene just writing this.

Just a little nibble in cheese’s direction starts to reveal a little more of the role that fat plays in our motivation for comfort food. Many studies have been carried out to look for the links between fatty foods and why we find them so appealing. In evolutionary terms, the sensory properties of fat have always been a reliable indicator that certain foods would give us calories and therefore energy. Fat has a whopping nine calories per gram, unlike protein and carbohydrates, which only have four calories per gram.18

It has been shown that the reward values can come from deep inside us as the brain receives hunger and satiety signals from the gastrointestinal tract.19 Meanwhile, outside the body, we can also be influenced by the way fatty foods look and smell, producing what’s called an ‘anticipatory food reward’ – something I’m sure we’ve all experienced when waiting in line to order in a fast-food queue.

In his book Taste Matters, John Prescott, a Professor of Psychology and Sensory Science, points out that one of fat’s major attributes is in the way it provides pleasant textures and sensations such as smoothness, creaminess, crunchiness and richness.20 When food is cooked in hot fat it becomes wonderfully crisp, yet when baked it stops the protein fibres in dough getting long and gives us crumbly cookies, quiche crusts and scones.

Fat is also reported to be a prominent carrier of flavour in many foods, and it is this phenomenon that makes fatty foods rarely dull and particularly moreish. In fact, a big dollop of our love for fat comes as it coats our tongues and increases the time flavour stays in contact with our taste buds. Every bite brings more and more flavour that we can savour for longer, and while a taste for sweet things decreases as we leave childhood, our preference for fat remains constant into adulthood.

Scientists have also looked at how feelings of sadness and stress can affect food preferences, and conversely, how food itself can affect how sad we feel. In 2011, a study published by the American Society for Clinical Investigation appeared to show how an overload of stress can lead to more fatty food consumption.21 The study using mice showed that as they were put under more psychosocial stress their levels of ghrelin (an appetite stimulant) and the stress hormone corticosterone increased, in turn stimulating them to seek out higher-fat foods. A second study from the same year, this time with humans, went some way to prove that when people were given a fatty acid solution (versus a saline solution), their sad emotions were reduced.22 Subjects were exposed to a combination of neutral and sad images and pieces of classical music and assessed with neuroimaging technology. The people who were given a fatty acid solution were found to have reduced sadness. What’s even more fascinating is that when people were simply exposed to the sad pictures and music, their sense of fullness when linked to the fatty substance was significantly reduced. When we’re down in the dumps, we just can’t get enough fat.

My chemical romance

In the comfort space, fat clearly has a lot to answer for and exerts a big influence on the choices we make, but since we’re poking around inside the body, let’s turn our attention to some other equally influential biochemistry. Imagine you curl up with a nice big bowl of spaghetti with extra cheese on the top. The high levels of carbohydrate in the pasta immediately start to increase levels of the monoamine neurotransmitter, 5-hydroxytryptamine. As you continue to eat, your mood improves, you feel happier, with a renewed sense of well-being. You enter a blissed-out state, you’re deeply satisfied, and the neurotransmitter volunteers its everyday name – ladies and gentlemen, you have been joined by one of mankind’s favourite dining companions, serotonin.

Consuming carbohydrate-rich foods increases serotonin levels in the brain and gives us that lovely feel-good factor (incidentally, that’s exactly how Prozac works). But remember the grated cheese on top of your pasta? Well, that happens to contain two amino acids called glycine and tryptophan. The first is a mild sedative and nerve and muscle relaxant, which helps you feel sleepy, while the second calms us, regulates our mood and fights anxiety. Tryptophan is also believed to stimulate serotonin, so that a simple bowl of cheesy pasta is like one big dinnertime love-in.

Serotonin is just one member of the so-called ‘feel-good hormones’ that regularly join the party as we eat nice things. They’re a joyful bunch and when released by glands into our bloodstream, play big roles in why comfort foods are so nice to snuggle up to.

Let’s beckon over serotonin’s famous cousin, dopamine. Dopamine is also a neurotransmitter and floods our brains when we do rewarding things such as kissing, having sex, gambling and tucking into a particularly pleasing comfort dish. Think of it as a chemical messenger running around your body, shouting to your brain that the good times are here. Dopamine is at the heart of our reward system and almost certainly developed to ensure we seek out foods with high fat and sugar content in order to survive. Of course, the more we set off dopamine in our system, the more we like it, and soon the associated behaviour (in our case, eating lovely feel-good food) gets imprinted into our choices and habits. In fact, in some scientific circles, it is believed that just thinking about eating that favourite ice cream or chicken soup triggers dopamine. It’s comfort food, without the eating!

Next up, it’s good old endorphins. Although often seen as the body’s natural painkillers, our third feel-good hormone is also a mealtime mainstay as it can be triggered by the very act of eating delicious food. The name endorphins comes from the term ‘endogenous morphine’ with the ‘endogenous’ meaning produced by the body and ‘morphine’ because of the opioid effect that endorphins resemble. Going for a good run, witnessing an amazing gig, having a good old laugh or even meditation can have the desired effect. In food, a classic player here is dark chocolate as the phenylethylamine it contains can improve your mood and increase endorphin production. While not as exciting, food such as leafy greens, nuts, seeds and avocados mixed into your comfort suppers can also have the same effect.

What makes endorphins different to both serotonin and dopamine is the very fact that they’re closely linked with pain management. In food, this plays out when we eat particularly hot and spicy foods that contain the compound capsaicin. Your brain thinks it’s in pain and as a response releases endorphins! Hello, Friday night curry euphoria.

Lastly, we set a place for oxytocin. Often called ‘the love hormone’ or ‘cuddle chemical’, it is produced in a deep part of the brain called the hypothalamus and is released into the bloodstream by the pituitary gland. It is classically associated with intimate physical contact such as cuddling and sex, but eating something you absolutely love can itself be so pleasurable that oxytocin is released. Furthermore, certain nutrients are good at helping oxytocin into the room such as vitamin C, vitamin D and magnesium.

So, by my calculations an ideal feel-good meal would be cheesy (tryptophan/serotonin) mushroom (vitamin D/oxytocin) linguine (carbohydrates) topped with chilli flakes (endorphins), followed by salted caramel ice cream (dopamine) with chunks of 90 per cent rich, dark chocolate to finish (more endorphins). I feel better just thinking about it (dopamine).

An eater in a foreign land

When we leave the comfort of our own home and travel further afield, our need for comfort food seems to get more pronounced. There may be a loneliness at play, feelings of isolation or a deeper longing to close the distances that open up when journeying far away. Often, we just want to feel less detached from ourselves and wish to replace alienation with the warm hug of familiarity.

I once had lunch aboard the Queen Mary 2, flagship of the Cunard cruise line fleet. They carry and feed up to 2,500 passengers at any one time and they told me an interesting fact about catering for this many people. Being a quintessentially British company, their menu was traditional British, all except for breakfast. They noticed that when people travel, quite quickly they want their own national breakfast, be that noodles, cold meats or fried eggs and bacon (they can also get quite uppity when it’s not on offer).

Remember our autopilot System 1 thinking; it’s well known how much energy it takes to make a new decision, and it seems the body is not a fan of using precious energy so early in the day. At breakfast, the default is often the comforting embrace of the familiar and it seems that we all need that piece of comfort when we’re at our weakest and that is often when we’ve just woken up.

This idea of pulling feel-good food towards us when we travel is not just the realm of normal folks like you and me. Amid gruelling international tours, many rock stars and musicians insist on highly detailed contractual clauses that specify the comfort foods that must be present backstage (it seems even Snoop Dogg needs a soothing stroke sometimes). These so-called ‘riders’ are reported to include one order of Fettuccine Alfredo (Guns N’ Roses), creamy peanut butter (Burt Bacharach), one can of American squeeze cheese (ZZ Top) and fresh corn on the cob cooked for exactly three minutes (Aerosmith).23

Another stressful part of travelling can be found at 30,000ft and the airline industry has a chequered past when it comes to food provision. In the 1940s and 1950s, when flying through the skies was still the preserve of the well-heeled and elite, mealtimes were amazing and designed to replicate – if not better – food on the ground, with lobster, steaks, tarts and cheese boards on the menu. Then, as economy class was invented, passenger numbers climbed, and food costs were managed more carefully. It was also found that the lack of humidity and lower air pressure decreased the flavour of food and drink by around 30 per cent.24 To compensate, airlines were advised to add salt and sugar to meals and serve common and reassuring options (meat, fish or pasta, madam?). It was even advised that they give passengers heavier, heartier dinners that sat in the stomach and kept people full until their destination.

Safely back on the ground, you’ll notice other ways we all look to reduce the strangeness of an alien place and pull recognisable and familiar foods closer. Have you ever been on holiday abroad and found yourself perplexed in a grocery store, scanning shelves of local products as mysterious brands stare back at you, unable to make a connection? Then you turn a corner and something wonderful happens. Your shoulders go back, you dart forward, for here, weary traveller, is the imported food aisle. Often small but perfectly formed, it magically offers the most famous of favourite foods all the way from dear old home. As a Brit, I have seen this all over the world with shelves politely stacked with Heinz Baked Beans, Kit Kats and PG Tips tea. South Africans are treated to the same welcome across London via the dedicated Savanna stores (note, there’s a lot of biltong on offer). While all major supermarkets in the UK have established aisles supplying herring, sauerkraut, soft cheeses and meats for residents who have migrated from Poland and other European countries.

Why is this so powerful? Well, it’s been said that comfort foods map who we are, the places we’re from and the routes we’ve travelled, and it is our food that we often hold closest and find most difficult to let go of. According to Jennifer Berg, director of graduate food studies at New York University, it is food that becomes particularly important when we become detached and distant from our mother culture. If we start living in a new country, our desire to blend in often means we quickly adapt our clothing and reduce visible indications of our origin. But behind closed doors, the food we eat often remains unchanged, acting as a personal shortcut to family members, old rituals and safety. As one of the hardest things to give up, comfort food remains a remnant we keep alive and one of the last things to relinquish when we relocate.25

If you’ve ever read actor Stanley Tucci’s memoir Taste: My Life Through Food, he gives his own vivid account of food on foreign film sets and how it can make or break your day as a weary actor far from home.26 Cast and crew often arrive on set as early as 4.30 a.m., so everyone’s already tired, and depending on the budget of the movie and the country they are in, different interpretations of breakfast are served. Hollywood blockbusters can consist of marquees with omelette stations, fruit, bagels, eggs and smoked salmon. In the UK (a favourite of Stanley’s), it’s classic British fare such as porridge, fried eggs and sausage baps, while in Germany, he talks of an extraordinary banquet of meats, cheeses and breads.

Stanley is happy. But what makes his tales of pick-me-up film food so amusing is his account of filming in Italy. As a self-confessed foodie, he is deeply excited about his first shoot on Roman soil but is horrified to discover that this country of food lovers seemingly cares not one bit for nourishing depleted actors. Breakfast is a dark place with no toasters, eggs or catering trucks at all. On a table might sit low-quality focaccia sandwiches with a single slice of salami next to warm orange juice. It’s enough to make you retreat to your trailer for the rest of the day. Stanley now lives in London and I do hope he doesn’t experience too many Italian film sets in the future. The English writer (and wonderfully named) William Somerset Maugham once said, ‘To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day’. Good advice for travelling actors everywhere.

My own ‘Italian film set’ moment happened not in Rome, but in Finland on a business trip to see the Nokia phone people. I found myself in a Helsinki hotel with a very early meeting to get up for and on the hunt for sustenance. It was my first time in the country, and I was yet to sample any of the cuisine, but to my relief the breakfast choice was easy. The menu perfectly described an English fry-up and my day was looking up. Thirty minutes later, room service arrived, and I did what everyone does at that moment and told the waiter to put it anywhere he liked and ushered him out as fast as I could.

Nothing prepared me for what I found – or rather, didn’t find. The toast was a dark, black sour rye bread (untoasted), the sausages looked like thin, withered fingers and the bacon was cold ham. Being hungry is one thing, but the promise then swift denial of a comfort food is difficult to come back from. Apologies to all the people at Nokia I met that day, my bad mood wasn’t all about the bad flight over and the 4 a.m. start.

When we’re in a strange land we sometimes have to work with what we’ve got. That could mean replicating personal favourites or inventing close proxies and doing our best to pretend. In his book, Better Food for Our Fighting Men