Comfort Foodways, Covid-19, and Liminality: Suspending Rules, Making New Ones

 Comfort Foodways, Covid-19, and Liminality: Suspending Rules, Making New Ones 

(Nov. 16, 2020)

 

One way the American public along with American food industries and food media have dealt with the covid-19 pandemic has been to turn to comfort food. It makes sense that they would. According to medical sociologist, Julie Locher, comfort food is food that people consume in order to alleviate stress. That the pandemic has caused a great deal of stress is obvious. Another way to understand this turn, though, is to look at both as being liminal states of being.

            Developed by scholars in ritual studies, folkloristics, and cultural anthropology (Falassi, 1986; Turner, 1969; van Gennep, 1960), liminality is technically a period in between two stages in a rite of passage. During such times, the rules of the old stage no longer apply, but the ones for the new stage are not yet established, relieving participants of the usual expectations for proper behavior. The concept was expanded and applied to other times in our lives as well as spaces in which the normal rules are suspended. (Tourism scholars, in particular, have used this idea.) 

From this perspective, we can see commonalities between comfort food and the Covid-19 pandemic. Both are times of suspending rules. With the pandemic, we have left behind an earlier stage with its established rules and will move eventually to a post-pandemic world. In the meantime, we’re not quite sure how to behave properly.

Comfort food, as used in the U.S., is a similar suspension of

 the normal guidelines for “healthy” eating. It can be an excuse to eat foods considered un-nutritious, “fattening,” or otherwise “bad” for us, but the need to relieve stress makes it morally ok to eat those foods--although we might regret it later on when we weigh ourselves. Comfort foodways can also serve as a medium through which individuals are playing with a potential new order. Will calories still count; will sugar still make us “hyper;” will carbohydrates still translate into pounds on our hips? 

This liminality in itself is oftentimes stressful, but it also offers the potential to develop new relationships with food. Foodways activities that were previously mundane chores —shopping, organizing cupboards, consuming weekday meals, cleaning up- are now being recognized as providing opportunities for participation in larger social networks as well as for performing of identities, values, and relationships. This time is forcing us to appreciate those everyday activities as meaningful ones. 

Also, disruptions caused by the pandemic to those routines can make us aware of the connectedness of our own culinary experiences to the larger food system and to the comforts-discomforts of others. Comfort food, as thought of now, tends to be about the wellbeing of the individual. Can we expand comfort foodways to take into account how the individual interacts with and impacts food systems and culture in general? Perhaps these new relationships will be permanent, encouraging us to not only find comfort in all food and foodways, but to work to offer those opportunities to others as well. The liminality of this time, then, offers a chance to create and establish new—and better--rules.