The concept behind comfort food.
What is comfort food? It’s the food that takes you on a gloomy day and wraps its warm embrace around you, collapses you with nostalgia and happiness so you eat and feel like you know what.
I will be alright.
My comfort is food one that transports me to the most peaceful and exciting time of my life, the time was supposed to be now. Now that we are adults and we have the free will to drive out late at night or decide to travel across the continent to explore. Find dangerous love and own our beliefs, no accountability. Sadly, It isn’t.
This peaceful and exciting time, this paradoxical combo happened to me as a child, The world was a fantasy and I was a princess because of my father’s chivalrousness and my mother’s warmth. At night we watched the stars till I fell asleep and half asleep I was on my father’s shoulder carefully petted on my mattress. And on Sundays, the socializing of my momma at church ended up with me finding out I had a week to buy a princess dress just to be a distant relative flower girl.
The concept of comfort isn’t in the taste of meals that make you smile, doing a happy dance because you are eating a scrumptious meal that you longed to afford or the entire week’s craving but one that transports you to a time in your life or being with a person or an experience that grants the coziness you need.
As I eat my comfort food hoping it transports me to a time in my life when it was Saturday morning and we had a bowl full of pap and mom’s sweet akara, the one she wakes up at 5 am to prepare while I am still snoring on my bed. After we are all done eating, we end up napping and wake up rejuvenated. No special activity happens but it gives me warmth and soothes me or perhaps they were activities and my brain links them to pap but are forgotten.
So today as I sit and take my first spoon of pap I am hoping I get the relief I crave.
You too should try it, maybe you should try the ice cream because it is so sweet or makes you feel like a child. Try the food you share with your favorite person and that somehow gives you warmth. Maybe it’s the food that transports you to a time or an experience. Go Eat! Savour the moments.
What’s your comfort food and why?
