A few nights ago, I gained a deeper understanding of comfort
food. You might think, what’s there to understand? You feel bad. You eat. You
feel better. That’s all there is to it, right? Well, yes. But I sometimes
wonder why the way to heal a heartache is through the stomach. Why a bag of
potato chips can salve a broken soul. Why
there is a certain dish you pair with a certain emotion. Why homemade adobo can
just be the way to achieve world peace. The other night while having a dinner
of champions with my friend Lisa, I understood. And tonight while I wiped out
the remains of a bottle of Speculoos Cookie Butter, my theory was affirmed.
On the night I met Lisa, I had just conducted a trainers' workshop for
20 rowdy men. I was exhausted, all my reserve energy spent, way beyond what we now
call the state of low batt. They were nice guys, but they were a handful. And
when bunched together against one female facilitator, they turn into little,
hormonal boys trying to test the limits. Not that they were hitting on me, but
they just wanted to see how far they could go with their sexual innuendos
before the teacher finally broke down and blushed. I did my best not to. And only
a teacher or trainer (or parents) can understand the physical strain, the inner
stress, of maintaining classroom authority while striking a balance between
being game and being strict. I had fun, tested my training capabilities,
learned a few useless factoids, but I got out of that classroom tired to the
bone. And I could not get home to plop into bed right away because of the dinner
date I committed to.
My friend, visiting from Singapore, was grieving the loss of
a friend to cancer. And she was as drained as I was. I asked her what she
wanted for dinner. First, she looked for Spanish cuisine, her comfort food of choice. Either there was no
good Spanish resto around, or I was just too brain dead to recall any. And so
her next choice—“I don’t want any of those big dish, small serving kind of
thing.” In other words, she didn't want anything prettily plated but was
unsatisfying, leaving you, after spending 1 thousand pesos a head, with the
desire to go through a drive-through to fill ‘em stomach up.
We picked Elias in BGC. If you’re looking for comfort food, it’s
hard to go wrong with Filipino food. Rich, unapologetic, fat-laden, carb-packed
comfort food. Capped by salted caramel and cheese cake ice cream from the
adjacent Cake Club.
And because when one is tired, mind and body slow down, my
senses allowed me to shut out the world for a moment and focus only on the
eating, and I heard and felt how that crispy tadyang scraped my stomach lining just before gently landing on that sweet spot at the bottom of my stomach. Eyes closed, taste buds
satisfied, I felt comfort, and things felt right.
It’s that part—that part when the food grazes through the
walls of your stomach—that’s where the comfort comes from. Because when one is
feeling sad, there’s only so much that a dear, dear friend can do as she rubs
your back. Food can get deeper within you and comfort you inside, where nobody
else can. That pork belly binagoongan rubbed my esophagus and said, “there,
there, there, everything will be all right.” And I believed it.
No English word can beat the Tagalog word for it—hagod. That’s
the motion when your mom lovingly rubs alcohol down your chest when you’re
sick. The motion when your BFF rubs your back while holding your hair as you
pour your dinner, half a bottle of Tanqueray gin, and all the bad juju from
that jerk of an ex into the toilet. There, there, there, everything will be all right.
That’s what comfort food does.
The richer, the creamier, the fatter, the thicker, the sweeter,
the better. Broth, that fat-free, carb-free, fun-free consommé would never do. Food comforts you like almost nothing else
can. Somewhere deep, deep inside, where you think the baddies can’t get in.
Sex, to some degree, can have the same effect. But sex is
complicated. Sex requires active participation. Reciprocity. A politically and
socially correct response. It requires a giving back. Selfish sex rarely
satisfies. But food—food does not expect anything back. It just gives. Soothes,
Calms you down. Rubs your insides until on the outside, you start feeling good
as well, capable of having animated conversations about more food.
There, there says that thick, gooey pumpkin soup. There,
there says that decadent chocolate cake. There, there, says the thigh part of
the original flavored KFC.
Tonight, that jar of Cookie Butter gave selflessly, saying
there, there. And I felt better.
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