Comfort Food
The Task
The task during class was to find some dataset about food and make some beautiful information out of it. Well, I came across a dataset that hit me right in the gut (pun intended) — Comfort Food of University Students. I guess this was the most relatable dataset to the whole class hahaha
Working With Data
The dataset had many many MANY columns and to be honest, I felt quite intimidated. There were so many ways to analyse the data. I could focus on the food, the reasons, whether there was a correlation between comfort food and one’s GPA. The list goes on and on. I scanned through the excel sheet and saw many columns of “mac n cheese”. Since there were so many repeats of “mac n cheese”, “pizza”, “ice cream”, I thought maybe I could focus on this column and make something out of it. So I started work.
It was very tedious to clean up the column. I tried to ‘ctrl + F’ different food items, which wasn’t as efficient as I hoped it to be, since there were a couple of spelling errors and different versions of spelling in the input. I ended up cleaning the data manually, it was a long and tough process :( After a while, I realized I overestimated myself and did not have the perseverance to go through the entire list (there were too many varieties of food!) I decided to ditch this column and look at another column — reasons for comfort food. Though the method of categorisation was the same as the actual comfort food, I found it easier to manually clean the data as there was much less variety. I did up a word cloud on why students eat comfort food
Why Students Eat Comfort Food
What’s the opposite of comfort? One would say stress. However, ‘Boredom’ came up to be the number 1 reason for comfort food. When students have nothing to do, they eat. I find that quite funny. In my opinion, it’s not that they have nothing to do, but they have nothing BETTER to do. I believe there is always something to do, an assignment to complete, a message to answer to. It’s just a matter of priorities. When students rule out all the tasks that they don’t want to do (yet), there’s nothing left on the ‘want to do’ list, thus they claim to be so-called “bored” The top other few reasons were stress, sadness and hunger. Personally, I tend to “stress-eat” and I would like to take this opportunity to delve deeper into stress and how comfort food helps.
Stress
“People are not disturbed by a thing, but by their perception of a thing” — Epictetus
According to a mental health study in 2008 by Associated Press and mtvU, 8 in 10 college students say they have sometimes or frequently experienced stress in their daily lives over the past three months. This is an increase of 20% from a survey 5 years ago.
It’s not surprising that students face stress in school (duh!) There are many ways to de-stress: exercising, sleeping, eating, singing etc, but as mentioned earlier, I want to focus on comfort food today.
Why comfort food comforts
So why does comfort food work? I did some online research and concluded with the following reasons:
1. To remind us of happier times
Comfort foods we crave are actually artifacts from our pasts. Humans tend to associate certain foods with past social gatherings with friends or family. So when we feel lonely, we crave for these foods to give us comfort and security and we symbolically consume that past happiness. Foods like pizza and fries and commonly eaten in a social setting and hence eating them improves the mood and produces feelings of social connectedness. Comfort food can also be linked to specific people in our lives, which makes comfort foods fairly unique to each individual.
2. To feel good
There is science behind the food. Certain foods such as chocolate release endorphins, or ‘happy hormones’ in the brains, making students feel happy, to counteract the feeling of stress or sadness. Chocolate is associated with the levels of serotonin in our body, which can boost one’s mood!
The Drawbacks…
It’s temporary
Ironically, comfort food has its own drawbacks and limitations. When stressed, students tend to turn to food to satisfy their emotional needs rather than their physical hunger. Eating may feel good in that specific moment, but the feelings that triggered the eating are still there. The stress is still there. Comfort food is just a temporary relief, not an actual problem solver, but perhaps it does the trick for students who just need an energy booster.
A potential problem
Comfort food can give you discomfort (haha). Comfort foods tend to be unhealthy, and the binge eating, stress eating, emotional eating on these unhealthy foods can give you a tummy ache.
In extreme cases, it may turn into eating disorders. Students may feel guilty after snacking so much and feel even more depressed, which backfires the entire point of comfort food.
So what’s the solution?
Eat in moderation and explore other areas of finding comfort/ relieving stress. In Singapore, there has been a lot of emphasis on eating healthy and having a balanced diet. I have friends who eat yoghurt and granola as snacks instead of pizza and chips! While comfort food provides us with comfort, and while it may be hard for everyone to stay healthy 24/7, we can all take small steps in making sure we don’t go overboard with our comfort food!
