Comfort Foods: a Spark for Remembering Calm and Peaceful Times

By Audie Bird

For my Gallery Walk Item I wanted to get a little hands-on with my project but most of all I wanted to make some memories of my own with some close friends and family!

I loved Ariana Gunderson’s Nostalghia Dinners idea and wanted to apply the idea of sharing comfort food with others in a new way. I decided instead of just sharing comfort foods and sharing the stories behind them, I would make the comfort foods with the person, and take as many pictures as I could to document the process! Finally I would compile my pictures together with the raw data I collected from the interviews and highlight what I considered to be the main and most-telling quotes/data of each person’s interview.

There is most definitely a connection between food and memory, and the connection between comfort food and memory is most likely linked in childhood memories that took place before “life got hard” and before many responsibilities. But the data I was specifically looking for when interviewing my participants was the connection between comfort foods, their adjoining memories, and sensations of calm, relaxation, and peacefulness.

For each of my participants I have pictures that document the process of making their comfort food and sharing that experience with them, but I purposely snapped a picture of the individual after we had eaten to show the waves of energy they might be emitting after having eaten their comfort food. I believe, when looking at the last photos of each participant, that their faces and body language express a calm, relaxed, peaceful, and happy energy (highlighted with a ★)! That’s what I wanted to look into and experience with my participants the most, and I believe I successfully captured that!