38. Comfort Food | Why Certain Foods Feel Like Home

Why does one person crave rice, another mashed potatoes, and someone else a very specific brand of instant noodles they have not eaten since university?

In this episode of Mohivate, Dr Mohi Sarawgee explores the science and psychology of comfort food. From dopamine and smell to memory, stress, familiarity, and culture, I look at why certain foods have the remarkable ability to make us feel better.

Along the way, there is the Proust effect, the neuroscience of anticipation, why comfort foods differ across cultures yet serve the same emotional purpose, and what happens in the brain when we reach for familiar foods during times of stress or uncertainty.

There is also a detour through some of the stranger stories in food history, from the invention of the Graham cracker to bacon on the moon, and a look at why food has always been about more than nutrition alone.

At its heart, this episode is about familiarity. The foods we return to, the meanings we attach to them, and why certain meals can feel like home long after we have left the places they came from.

Because comfort food is rarely just about what is on the plate. It is about what it represents, what it remembers, and what it helps us find again.

This episode is for anyone who has ever stood in front of an open fridge at midnight. Which is to say, everyone.

REFERENCES

1.Smell, memory, and the brain’s bypass of the thalamus — Harvard Medicine Magazine: https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/connections-between-smell-memory-and-health

2.Food-related odours and dopaminergic brain activation — Frontiers in Human Neuroscience: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00625/full

3.Smell and memory pathway (bypassing the thalamus) — Cleveland Clinic: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/smells-and-memory

4.Flavour preferences formed via amniotic fluid and breast milk — BookPage / The Secret History of Food: https://www.bookpage.com/behind-the-book/26562-top-12-weirdest-moments-food-history-history/

The neuroscience of comfort food and individual variation (Yale) — BrainFacts.org: https://www.brainfacts.org/thinking-sensing-and-behaving/diet-and-lifestyle/2023/why-cant-we-resist-comfort-food-080123

6.Cortisol, stress, and cravings for high-fat, high-sugar foods — Time Out: https://www.timeout.com/london/news/the-science-behind-why-comfort-food-is-actually-a-thing-122620

7.Graham cracker history and ketchup/tomato history — LoveFood: https://www.lovefood.com/gallerylist/128759/killer-tomatoes-and-other-strange-historic-food-facts

8.Apollo 11 freeze-dried bacon — Instacart Food Facts: https://www.instacart.com/company/ideas/food-facts

9.Chicken soup, neutrophils, and anti-inflammatory effects — The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/does-chicken-soup-really-help-when-youre-sick-a-nutrition-specialist-explains-whats-behind-the-beloved-comfort-food-213847

10.Comfort food around the world — Diversity Plus: https://diversityplus.com/web/Article.aspx?id=Finding-Comfort-in-Food-Around-the-Globe-5544

Just a gentle reminder: this episode is for information, education, and inspiration only. It’s not a substitute for your doctor’s advice. For any personal health concerns, always seek guidance from your doctor.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hi everyone, welcome back to Mohivate. I'm Dr. Mohi Saraugi, GP by profession, but here I'm swapping prescriptions for perspective. Today we are discussing a topic that has never let any of us down and has been remarkably consistent through every phase of your life. Comfort, food. What do we mean by it? Why do we have it? Why does it work? And why is it almost never actually about the food? And along the way, I promise you some of the strangest, funniest food stories I have come across in a long time. A reverend who invented a biscuit for slightly unexpected reasons, bacon on the moon, and much more. Honestly, food history is wild. And by the end, I have a small hope. If the name of your comfort food is already forming in your head right now, by the end of this episode, I hope you're craving it. We are coming back to that thought. So let's begin. Have you ever wondered why one person craves rice, another mashed potatoes, someone else, a very specific brand of instant noodles they haven't eaten since university? So what do we even mean by comfort food? It is exactly what it sounds like: the food you turn to for how it makes you feel. Safe, looked after, like everything might be okay. The phrase sounds almost childish, simple, but hidden inside it are questions about memory, stress, culture, neuroscience, attachment, evolution, and perhaps even identity itself. Comfort food sits simultaneously in the kitchen, the nervous system, and the emotional life of a person. And the more science learns about it, the more interesting it becomes. There is no biochemical pathway labeled comfort, no receptor sitting on a neuron waiting specifically for mac and cheese. Comfort food is a psychological category. It describes a food that produces emotional relief. And that distinction matters because the food itself is rarely the point. One of the most telling findings in comfort food research is that comfort foods vary dramatically across cultures, across families, even within the same household. There was never going to be one food humanity agreed on, and that in itself tells you something. The meaning was never really in the dish. Research suggests that flavors from a mother's diet, such as vanilla, garlic, carrot, even mint, for example, pass through amniotic fluid and breast milk, and babies show a preference for those flavors later in life. So when someone says a dish tastes like home that may be more literal than they realize, home quite possibly started in the womb. Now let's understand what actually happens when we eat something comforting. There's a part of our brain called the nuclear succumbers involved in releasing dopamine. Comfort foods tend to be high in carbohydrates and fat, both particularly good at triggering this dopamine response. And the most interesting part, simply thinking about your comfort food can trigger a small dopamine release before you have eaten a single bite. Your brain begins rewarding you for the anticipation. That is the dopamine effect. Then there is smell, and smell is doing something none of your other senses are allowed to do. Sight, sound, touch, taste, every one of them has to go through a kind of security checkpoint in the brain in an area called the thalamus before it is allowed anywhere near your emotions or memories. Smell apparently skips the cue entirely. It walks straight past security and goes directly into the amygdala and the hippocampus, the parts of your brain that handle emotion and memory. No appointment needed. Researchers call this odor-evoked autobiographical memory, which is a very technical way of explaining why you can remember exactly what your mother's cooking smelled like decades ago, but cannot remember what you had for lunch on Tuesday. This is why one whiff of something can undo you completely. You smell a particular spice, something baking, even just the inside of a specific tin, and suddenly you're not in the kitchen anymore. You're seven years old again at a table with someone who's probably no longer making that dish for you. Scientists call this the Proust effect, named after the writer Marcel Proust, who famously spent several pages of a novel completely derailed by a biscuit dipped in tea. Fair enough, some biscuits deserve several pages. One study put people in brain scanners and fed them food from their childhood. Blood flow increased in the regions associated with emotion and reward. Dopamine flooded the system. The food was not just food, it was a small, edible time machine. Now I want you to actually do this, not just nod along. Actually think of it. Your comfort food, the dish that does this to you. It does not have to be impressive, not a five-cost family feast, not your grandmother's secret recipe written on a card somewhere. It can be a tin of beans on toast, a packet of soup that tastes like nothing on earth except your own childhood. I'll go first. Mine is rice, lentils, and spicy potatoes. It's my sister's too and one of my closest friends. We were all born and brought up in the eastern and northeastern part of India where rice is a huge part of the culture. So maybe that's no coincidence. But for me, like most of you, it's simply the taste of home. Even now, when I go back, my mum asks what I want to eat on the day I arrive. That's always the answer. So have you thought of yours? Good. Hold on to that. We are coming back to it. Now let me explain something that goes a little deeper. And I think it's genuinely one of the most interesting things in this entire episode. Most people assume comfort foods work mainly because they taste good and release dopamine. True, but incomplete. The human brain is fundamentally a prediction machine. Every second of every day, it's trying to predict what happens next, what you'll see, what you'll hear, whether you're safe, whether something needs attention, whether energy should be conserved or mobilized. Prediction is one of the brain's primary jobs, and predictable things are metabolically efficient. They require less vigilance, less evaluation, less effort. This becomes specially important during stress. When life feels uncertain, the nervous system starts searching for signals of familiarity, familiar people, routines, environments, and familiar food. A comfort food is often a food whose outcome the brain has successfully predicted hundreds of times before. It already knows how it tastes, how it smells, how it feels, and exactly what emotional associations come with it. There's no guesswork, and in a stressed nervous system, predictability itself can feel reassuring. This may explain why people rarely develop intense cravings for foods they've never encountered. Nobody becomes emotionally attached to a meal they've never eaten. Comfort foods are almost always established relationships and they behave exactly like relationships. It also explains something curious. People who move countries often develop powerful cravings for foods they barely noticed while living at home. Foods that were simply background, ordinary, unremarkable. For me, it's bottlegored, a vegetable that is about as humble and unremarkable as it gets. In India, nobody gets excited about bottleg, and yet the moment I spot it in a shop here in England, it goes straight in the basket. I never gave it a second thought growing up. Now it feels like a small win every time. The food itself hasn't changed. Its meaning has. Distance transforms familiarity into something valuable, and value transforms familiarity into comfort. Now let's talk about why on a hard day your brain doesn't go looking for something healthy. When you're stressed, your body releases cortisol, and cortisol is brilliant in short bursts. It's what gets you out of the way of a car through a difficult phone call or over the finish line of a deadline at the last possible second. But cortisol also does something less convenient. It increases your appetite and specifically increases your craving for food that is high in fat, sugar, or both. At the same time, eating these foods gives you a small hit of dopamine and serotonin, the same brain chemicals involved in pleasure and mood. So when you're stressed and you reach for something rich and carby, your brain is doing exactly what it evolved to do. It's looking for the fastest available route to feeling better. And here's the thing: most of these foods are not just naturally hard to stop eating, they are engineered to be. Food scientists actually have a name for it. They call it the bliss point, the exact ratio of sugar, fat, and salt that makes a food feel maximally satisfying. Calculated, tested on huge groups of people, adjusted until it hits. The ratio almost never occurs in nature. Even a potato is not naturally salty, fatty, and sweet all at once. A crisp somehow is all three. Make of that what you will. Potato or laboratory. So the next time you find yourself at the bottom of a packet of something, wondering how that happened, you can relax. Your willpower was never the opponent here. The opponent was a food scientist somewhere, possibly with a clipboard, who did their job extremely well and frankly deserved a pay rise. Which brings us to a very specific, very universal scene. Stress faking, sad desk lunches, the 11 pm fridge rate that somehow commonly ends up with a slice of cold pizza eaten standing up in the dark, like you're hiding from someone when you live alone in your own kitchen. We joke about all of this constantly, and honestly, the jokes are accurate. This, the reaching for something, the small relief, the brief lift is exactly the dopamine and bliss point story we just talked about playing out in real time. But underneath the joke, there's something worth understanding properly. That route, comfort, relief, feeling better is a short one. The relief is real, but it's brief. And this is where things can quietly shift from comfort into coping. There's a pattern here, and I suspect a lot of you will recognize it. Something stressful happens, you feel bad, you reach for something comforting. For a little while, you feel better. Then the feeling fades because the thing that was stressing you out is still there, completely unmoved by the fact that you've just eaten half a packet of biscuits. So now you feel the original stress again, plus a new layer of guilt on top, because somewhere along the way, most of us picked up the idea that needing comfort is something to be slightly ashamed of. And guilt, it turns out, is also stressful, which increases cortisol, which increases the craving, and round and round it goes. It's a feedback loop, and feedback loops are very good at running themselves without any help from you. This is where a lot of health conversations go wrong. Even as doctors, when we ask about appetite, particularly when someone is feeling low, people often say they've been reaching for comfort food more than usual, and the answer isn't to say stop. I'm not about to tell you the solution to a heart week is a stick of celery and some deep breathing. Comfort food works. That's the whole point. The dopamine is real, the memory is real, the relief is real, unless, of course, you're repeatedly eating an entire tub of ice cream by yourself at midnight, spoon directly from the container, lights off, in which case, no judgment, but also maybe get a bowl next time so it feels more like a treat and less like a crime scene. The issue is when food becomes the only tool in the box, the way you cope with a hard day every time, regardless of what's going on. So here's a genuinely small doable thing. Next time you reach for that dish in one of these coping moments, pause for about three seconds before the first bite just to notice what's actually going on underneath. Are you hungry? Are you tired? Are you fine? And this is just nice? Or is there something else sitting there that food isn't really going to fix? But maybe a phone call to someone who matters might. You don't have to act on the answer, just notice it. That's the whole tip. And the next time you notice it, you'll know whether it's joy or whether it's something else asking to be heard. Now, a quick detour. Because if comfort food is partly about story and meaning, it helps to know that the story of food itself is wonderfully strange. In the 1820s, an American reverend named Sylvester Graham became deeply concerned that certain foods, meat, fat, spices, coffee, were stimulating urges in young men that he felt were best left unstimulated. His solution was to invent a bland, unexciting biscuit intended to calm those urges through sheer blandness. He called it the Graham Cracker. It became enormously popular, and I suspect quite a few of you recognize the name. Centuries later, it became the base of a s'more, which I think tells you everything you need to know about how well that plan worked out. Ketchup, in its earliest versions, contained fish and mushrooms, not tomatoes at all. The tomato didn't arrive in ketchup until much later. And even then, tomatoes spent centuries being widely believed to be poisonous, partly because they are botanically related to deadly nightshade, a genuinely poisonous plant family. Tomatoes, thankfully, did not inherit that particular trait. But try telling that to 16th century Europe. The scientific name for a tomato literally translates to wolf peach. Somewhere between wolf peach and ketchup, humanity made some interesting choices. And in 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon had bacon. Freeze-dried bacon was part of the Apollo 11 food supply, making it one of the first foods ever eaten on another world. Which means that somewhere in the history of human achievement, alongside First Steps on the Moon, Sits also had bacon. Now, comfort food around the world, because this is where it gets genuinely lovely. Ask someone in America and you might hear mashed potatoes or mac and cheese. In Italy, pasta in some form or another, always. In India, it might be rice and lentils, curd rice or kichari. A dish Ayurveda has loved for centuries and one that simply means home. In Japan, a steaming bowl of ramen. In Korea, kimchi, fermented, sour, deeply familiar. In Thailand, mango sticky rice. In Mexico, something wrapped in a tortilla, eaten standing up. In France, something involving butter and the unshakable belief that butter solves most problems. In the UK, fish and chips, ideally eaten outside in the cold, from the paper, while pretending the seagulls aren't watching you. Different ingredients, different cuisines, different histories, the same emotional experience underneath. Humanity never agreed on which food is most comforting. Every culture, every family, every individual has their own version, and that's exactly where the meaning comes from. And there's something I find moving about all of this. Across cultures that look nothing alike, eat nothing alike, and speak entirely different languages, the function of comfort food is identical. It says you're safe, you're looked after. Someone or something is taking care of you. Even if that someone is you on a Tuesday evening making the one dish that always works. And there's one dish almost every culture seems to have its own version of, usually involving something warm, something soupy, something with broth or rice at its heart. The dish you make when someone is unwell. So is there any actual science here or is it simply a very old, very comforting placebo? The answer, slightly delightfully, is both. Chicken soup as a remedy goes back a very long way. A Roman army surgeon was recommending versions of it nearly 2000 years ago. A 12th century physician called Maimonides was prescribing it for respiratory symptoms long before anyone had heard the word virus. In Eastern European Jewish communities, it earned the affectionate name Jewish penicillin. And whatever your version is, whether that's chicken soup, a lentil broth, or a vegetable congee, a study actually tested chicken soup's effect on neutrophils, a type of white blood cell involved in the inflammation that gives you a stuffy nose, a sore throat, general cold misery. The soup appeared to mildly reduce the movement of these cells to inflamed tissue. In other words, it may have a small, real anti-inflammatory effect. Not a cure, but not nothing either. Add to that the warm broth-thinning mucus, the hydration, the easily digestible ingredients, and the simple psychological comfort of being looked after. And you have a dish doing several quiet jobs at once. Grandma, it turns out, was on to something. Science just took a couple of thousand years to catch up. And if the moment I said chicken soup, your brain immediately registered the chicken part with a slight higher protein superiority complex, let me reassure you, it was a warm soup doing the work here, not the protein. In Russia, a thin pancake called blini has over centuries been given to new mothers, served at funerals, and eaten to celebrate the arrival of spring. The same dish for birth, for grief, for hope. Comfort food shows up for every emotion you can think of. And I think most of us know this instinctively, even if we've never put it into words. When someone is grieving across so many cultures, the response is the same. Someone brings food because food is one of the few languages that doesn't require the right words. You can't always say the right thing to someone who's hurting, but you can put a warm dish in front of them and somehow. That says it anyway. And there's a quieter version of this too. The people who know your comfort food who, without being asked, make it for you on a hard day or when you're unwell, or sometimes simply because they remembered. That in itself is its own quiet form of love. There's another part of comfort food that gets less attention. Identity. Food is one of the first cultural languages we learn. Long before we understand geography, politics, or history, we understand food. We learn where we come from through family traditions, religious celebrations, recipes that outlive the people who created them. Food becomes part of how we understand belonging, which means comfort foods are often carrying something much larger than flavor. They are carrying identity. And this may be part of why conversations about food can become unexpectedly emotional. People are rarely just defending a recipe, they are defending a piece of themselves. So, the dish you named earlier, the one I asked you to hold on to, has it been sitting there quietly in the back of your mind this whole time we've been talking? Maybe you can almost taste it right now. That small warm pull somewhere in your chest or your stomach, or maybe it took you somewhere: a kitchen, a table, hand stirring a pot, the particular warmth of someone serving you without you even having to ask. That's the dopamine doing exactly what we talked about earlier, just from thinking about it. But the dish was never really about the food. It may have been a space, a feeling, or a person who made it, even if that person was you. A version of the day when nothing was complicated yet. The food was just the door. What you were actually walking through it to find was a feeling of being safe, known, home. And perhaps this is why comfort food has remained such an enduring idea. Humans have always been attached to ordinary things: a meal, a table, a smell, a familiar taste. Science tells us comfort food involves memory, prediction, reward pathways, stress physiology, culture, and identity. But its real appeal comes from something simpler. Comfort food reminds us that eating has never been purely biological. Yes, calories matter, nutrition matters. But food has always done more than sustain life. It marks celebrations, it accompanies grief, it welcomes people home, it preserves culture. And on an ordinary, difficult day, food often provides something many of us are quietly searching for. You might think it's happiness or excitement or escape, but what we are usually looking for is familiarity, and there's something profoundly human about that. So, what's your comfort food? I'd genuinely love to know. Message me, tell me, and let's see what we end up with. A small map of comfort from kitchens all over the world. And I hope, even if not today, but sometime in the next few days, you reach for it just as a loving memory and it brings a smile to your face. I hope something today stirred a thought made you hungry or simply made you pause. Thank you for listening. I'm Dr. Mohi. Until next time, remember this familiarity is one of the oldest signals of safety we know, and perhaps that is why the things that comfort us so often lead us back home to ourselves.