I’ve made my stance clear: the meals we share and the food we eat serve a purpose greater than nourishment and sustenance. They connect us to one another. Through them we cross borders, embracing different cultures without our feet ever leaving the soil they’ve grown accustomed to.
While I do advocate for dining together and trying different cuisines, I’m equally interested in dining alone and indulging in foods cherished only by myself.
I understand the need for change - I don’t fear it or resent it, but, still, it can overwhelm me.
It creates this space in my chest where I ache for a constant in a life that can otherwise feel haphazard.
Maybe it’s the result of being 23 that leaves me grasping for anything tangible. Maybe staggering through this suffocating fog of ambiguity is a rite of passage. It’s like a new avenue opens each week only to swerve, throwing me from the track or closing completely. Opportunities arise then dissolve just as swiftly.
I feel like I am trying to establish footing on a treadmill that keeps changing its pace.
When life assaults me with its challenges that appear insurmountable, irreparable, or maybe just exhausting, I search for the steady, the old reliables, finding solace in what I know.
Like fast-food, fine-dining, plant based and on, comfort food deserves its own cuisine category. Comfort food nourishes our body on a level deeper than primal need. It creates a warmth that spreads throughout, resulting in a sense of contentedness. It tastes like sweet satisfaction.
Maybe you pour a cup of hot chocolate with jumbo marshmallows. Or maybe it’s a grilled three-cheese sandwich. Maybe it’s just a can of spaghettios. Whatever it is, it’s reliable. It’s familiar. It’s comfort food.
Nostalgia is my comfort food of choice. It is whatever takes me back, whatever can satiate my longing for simplicity.
When I crave that steadiness, I reach for my childhood favorites desiring a closeness with my past. I seek a taste of that burden-free time.
I weave through the grocery store and toss my good intentions aside. I let my past overload my senses and dictate my direction: Stauffer's Animal Crackers, chocolate milk, Velveeta Shells and Cheese, and single-serve cinnamon applesauce cups. My cart looks like an homage to my childhood.
I outgrew my childhood taste buds and can typically resist these impulse buys. Sometimes just looking at the items with a fuzzy fondness is enough. I see a box of Frosted S'mores Pop Tarts and remember the smell of my best friend's house on a Saturday morning. I walk past of bag of animal crackers - a luxury only bought on vacation - and feel sand and salty-air. A box of ice cream drumsticks transplants me to my grandparents house on a Sunday after church.
Other days my nostalgia is too strong to fight. The world drains me and that hit just is not enough; I find little satisfaction in the sight of these items and the memories they evoke. Maybe, I think, I can really feel that comfort of my blessed childhood if I just purchase a bag of Orville Redenbacher. So I make that impulse buy not because I hunger for the food itself but rather for the catharsis of revisiting a calmer time.
I hope that when the food passes my lips, my feet find more solid ground. Even if that feeling only lasts for one moment.
After that first bite, the sentimentality evaporates like cotton candy on my tongue. The novelty wears away and I am reminded why I no longer buy these foods: the Pop Tarts taste dull, the animal crackers are just crackers, and the mac and cheese comes out of the tube. My imagination played a trick on me. What was I expecting?
Every ounce of nostalgia packed inside my comfort food seeps into that first bite. An aftertaste of disillusionment follows, dominating my taste-buds and mocking my memory.
But along with the sobriety of that second bite comes perspective: If I wrongly remember the past treats as being so indulgent, perhaps I also wrongly remember my childhood.
This realization humbles me. In my ache for comfort, I imagined a past much different from its reality. My present state skews with my memories, murking up details and constructing half-truths. I focus only on warm memories, viewing my life as simpler than it must have actually been.
I feel a bit ashamed at how degrading I have been to eight-year-old Morgan. I boiled down her worries, concerns, and problems she dealt with, deeming them trivial enough to be fixed with a bowl of Cocoa Pebbles and after-school cartoons. But the grievances of my eight-year-old self must have seemed monumental to me at the time.
Yet I cannot specifically recall any of those worries, concerns, or problems. They held no permanency. When I recall my childhood, I recall only bliss.
Through tasting my nostalgia-infused comfort foods I’m hit with the freeing concept: nothing in life in permanent. Not my affinity for childhood snacks nor my problems. The weight of that realization relaxes me.
It’s why I can take risks: I can move to Vietnam. I can take a job I’m unsure of. I can say “yes,” aware that “yes” now does not mean I cannot say “no” later. Life becomes more manageable with the awareness that nothing is permanent.
I can let myself feel how I feel. I can experience all the complicated or painful, human emotions - be it stress, anger, anxiety, sadness, uncertainty - with the knowledge that this is all transient.
There is a shelf above my bed. When I place my head on my pillow in the evening, I see the underside. Some time during high school I wrote myself a note to read every night before falling asleep: “This too shall pass.” I don’t remember why I wrote it, but I do know that whatever prompted me to do so did, in fact, pass.
If I remember my childhood to have been worriless, if I have somehow forgotten all that seemed devastating at the time, perhaps I should consider that ten years from now I will wrongly remember being 23 the same way. I won’t look at the uncertainty and challenges and rejections of these years as everlasting or detrimental.
Maybe instead I’ll look back with warm tenderness and nostalgia and think “what a wild ride.”
