Comfort food for breakups

An excellent Toronto Food & Drink Blog is carrying a review of Marusya Bociurkiw's new book, "Comfort Food For Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl." Despite the seemingly light-hearted title the book runs the emotional gamut. From the review:

Marusya Bociurkiw looks back at the personal highs and lows of her life through the food associated with each event. This collection of short stories and essays, interspersed with recipes, offers a glimpse into the Toronto-based writer and filmmaker’s life via what she ate and with whom.

She recounts the curry she cooked for her homeless brother, the coffee she drank on a visit to Ukraine, a torte brought by her mother on a trip, the rye bread from a Jewish bakery she visits with her father, a former prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. She tells of her various friends and lovers and the food she cooked for them and ate with them, as well as the food she ate to comfort herself when they were gone.

Comfort Food For Breakups is a beautiful collection of food memoirs, each one striking and poignant as they reveal Bociurkiw’s ongoing relationship between food and emotion, particularly love. The author paints a vivid picture of each person, each food, each place, as she describes all of the above with detail and care.

Good reading when chocolate and a sad movie aren't the answer, I guess.

Emotional Eating

The Toledo Free Press is running a story online today about Emotional Eating. Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand lab at the University of Illinois, is quoted listing the usual reasons why we turn to comfort food, but has further:

broken down the types of comfort foods used based on sex and different moods. The No. 1 comfort food, to no one's surprise, is ice cream. After ice cream, women prefer chocolate and cookies and men prefer pizza, steak and casserole. Sad people prefer ice cream and cookies 40 percent of the time and bored people prefer potato chips 36 percent of the time.

The only thing I'd add to the men's list is just about any cold cereal, perhaps a quirk only my brothers and I share.