Chicken soup for the psyche

What food do you turn to when you’re sick or as a pick-me-up after a hard day? Pics/istock

One day, chicken soup came up in the session with my patient Bronte - both the homemade and the tinned variety. That day, Bronte had news to tell me: she said it was ‘over' with her boyfriend, Eliot, whom she had been with for just over a year. In therapy, Bronte had said plenty about what was wrong in the relationship - or really, what Eliot was doing wrong in the relationship - from the moment she came to see me a few months prior. In fact, she spoke a lot about Eliot in general. I had got to know him quite well; in some ways, perhaps better than Bronte. I knew that Eliot was a chef and that he'd worked in some really well-known restaurants all around the world. He enjoyed exploring new cuisines, discovering new ingredients and developing his repertoire of tools and techniques. Now Eliot was getting ready to open his own restaurant, a fusion place in a trendy part of London where he would showcase all of his culinary expertise, including molecular gastronomy.

Chicken soup with matzo balls

Bronte, on the other hand, wasn't very exploratory. At that time she was getting ready to celebrate her ten-year anniversary at the company she had worked for since graduating from university. She was an interior designer, and she'd met Eliot while working on his restaurant space.

Bronte's job was to make things comfortable for other people, but she liked to do this for herself too. It made Bronte uncomfortable to "rock the boat" in any way - at work or at home, and especially in her relationship with Eliot…

In our session that morning, Bronte told me Eliot had done something that made her feel very distressed on the day their relationship had ended. Bronte had spent all of last week bedridden with a nasty bout of flu. She'd cancelled everything in her diary, including our session. As soon as Eliot heard Bronte was ill, he dropped everything and went straight over to look after her. He brought several bags of fresh ingredients with him and spent all afternoon in the kitchen cooking up a storm. Hours later, Eliot came into Bronte's bedroom holding a tray laden with a large bowl of steaming soup and a freshly baked roll.

There was also a paper napkin folded into a swan and a little vase with some flowers from the garden. The soup Eliot had cooked for Bronte wasn't anything trendy or modernist or molecularly gastronomical. This soup was original, yet traditional, and the recipe had been passed through the generations of Eliot's family. It was his Jewish grandmother's ‘penicillin': chicken soup with matzo balls. This was Eliot's comfort food.

But it was uncomfortable for Bronte.

"I told him straight, no soup was going to make me feel better. Not even his bubbe's," said Bronte. "I've never seen chicken soup like that before. He should've just opened a tin." She looked confused and inconvenienced all at once.

Later that day it was Eliot's turn to be uncomfortable as, for some reason, Bronte's upset about the soup increased.

She didn't eat it. She also didn't mince her words about Eliot ("you're an idiot, spending all day making it") or his grandmother ("she's silly calling it ‘penicillin' because it looks toxic to me"). She threw some gastronomical bombs too, big ones, about the matzo balls ("there are fatty lumps floating around in it") and the soup's greasy, shmaltzy surface ("there's so much oil, maybe the American army will invade the bowl!"). Bronte's verbal attack on Eliot and the soup went on for the entire afternoon. Eliot told her he'd had enough and that he was leaving. Bronte was assailed by her emotions of anger, sadness and fear, so she exploded and said, "Fine, it's over then". After he left, she stormed into the bathroom and flushed the soup down the toilet, and all her hopes for their relationship along with it.

[British psychiatrist and one of the founders of the attachment theory John] Bowlby said that no form of behaviour is accompanied by stronger feeling than attachment behaviour. Or in this case, un-attachment behaviour, which had caused this to become chicken soup not for the soul, but for the hole.

Chicken soup is the ultimate comfort food, so what was wrong? Why did it not have the right effect on Bronte?

How could it have made her so uncomfortable?

After Bronte had finished describing all the details of the soup showdown, I realised that I had yet another piece of information about Eliot: I now knew his comfort food. But I didn't know hers. So I said:
"Bronte, what is your comfort food?"

I thought she'd have an instant answer, but she didn't.

Instead, there was a minute's silence before she responded.

"I don't know, she said, looking a little lost. ‘I don't think I have one."

I knew the reason why. Her declaration that no soup - or any other food, for that matter - was going to make her feel better was actually true. Comfort food is comforting, but only for those who know the comfort and security of relationships. This has been shown recently in attachment research: that food can be a safe haven, just like a person.

The safe haven is, in fact, one of the key ingredients of attachment. I have often seen "attachment" used as a catch-all term for any and all close relationships. But it isn't. In a scientific sense, an attachment is a relationship bond with some specifics. It's a person who feels like home, a home you can go back to for safety, closeness and comfort when times get tough - a person who is your safe haven - and it's the same with comfort food. One study showed that everyday experiences of loneliness were associated with eating more comfort food, but only for those who had a secure, safe haven in someone. The effect in that experiment was only for comfort food and not just any food participants could get their hands on. Another study found that those secure people also experienced less loneliness by merely writing about their personal comfort food. That's how powerful attachment associations and food can be. And they are always personal. My comfort food is not your comfort food. It also might surprise you to hear not everyone's comfort food is something sugary or stodgy or fatty; some of the comfort foods in that study I just mentioned included kimchi and gyoza - dumplings minus the schmaltz, that is).

Even though evolution has beautifully crafted your biology so that eating junk food feels good, that doesn't mean you feel secure. That comes from the association with the person you have that emotional bond with.

Bronte had no comfort food because, unlike Eliot, she had no experience of comfort people - in other words, secure attachments.

Excerpted with permission from The Kitchen Shrink: How the food we eat is the key to how we love by Dr Andrea Oskis, published by Bloomsbury Publishing