Why we love comfort foods

There is nothing like comfort food to warm up rainy days. Some of them may be bad for your health, but they're actually good for your emotions. In TIME magazine, Alexandra Sifferlin writes:

"It makes intuitive sense that positive experiences with a given food could influence our craving for it later on, but recent research also suggests something else is at play, too: comfort foods remind us of our social ties, which means they may help us feel less lonesome when we feel isolated. In a recent July 2015 study, Jordan Troisi, an assistant professor of psychology at Sewanee, The University of The South, and his colleagues found that people with strong relationships preferred the taste of comfort food when they experienced feelings of social isolation.

Of course, what counts as comfort food is different person to person. When Troisi has asked people write about an experience they've had with a comfort food, essays have ranged from soup to kimchi. 'It's not just that ice cream, for instance, is really tasty. It's that someone has developed a really significant meaning behind the idea of ice cream due to their relationships with others, and that's what is triggering this effect,' he says."

When I think of comfort food, I think of caldereta. Growing up in a Filipino family, I learned to associate the tasty beef stew with laughter, kindness and festivities.