Eating and drinking affect, sometimes markedly, people's moods. The interaction runs the other way, too, so that depressed, manic, or anxious states lower or sometimes heighten appetite, or a particular mood can affect food choices. The connections between food and mood have implications for advertisers of snack foods, for those seeking to lift their spirits through binge eating or drinking, and for gourmands planning successful dinners.
Alcohol can manipulate mood by affecting the release of certain chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters. The caffeine in coffee and other drinks is another stimulant whose overuse has detrimental health effects. Herbs have a range of medical effects, and some mushrooms are mind-altering. But while a variety of foods contain chemicals with known psychotropic properties, they are generally in such minuscule quantities as to have little discernible effect on human consumers.
More noticeable changes occur through a combination of cognitive, sensory, cultural, social, and environmental factors. For example, chocolate contains chemicals that alter mood, such as caffeine, theobromine, and phenylethylamine, in quantities too small to account for the cravings of so-called "chocoholics." Instead, people value chocolate's sweet taste and voluptuousness, because it melts just below body temperature, and so coats the tongue. The pleasurable sensations release chemicals, called opioid peptides, in the brain that lift mood. Chocolate has long been advertised as a luxury, and parents and others choose it to reward good behavior. All these uses reinforce chocolate's reputation as an "indulgence," "temptation," and even "sin."
Likewise, some acclaimed aphrodisiacs contain traces of chemicals that might stimulate sexual activity (suggestions include the zinc in oysters and a chemical related to the male hormone testosterone in truffles). But the pleasures associated with their consumption can be more striking than any actual chemical effect. One of these foods is extraordinarily slippery and the other headily aromatic. In addition, the seducer may offer them in a mood-inducing setting, such as a comfortable, candlelit room filled with "mood music."
Even the psychological response to alcohol is dependent on numerous factors, not the least of which are the experience and existing mood of the drinker, the setting, and the organoleptic or sense-stimulating properties of, perhaps, a fine wine. As such, the same drink can make people feel euphoric, merry, riotous, bored, or maudlin. Some researchers have found that high-carbohydrate foods reduce tension and cheer people up, while high fat foods have the opposite effect, but this theory is not supported by the English writer Charles Lamb's paean to pork crackling, "Dissertation on Roast Pig," published in the 1820s. With mock seriousness, Lamb attributes the discovery of cooking to the "oleaginous . . . ambrosian" deliciousness of pork fat.
An angry remark, an overlong gap between courses, a disturbing location, or the overdoing of food and drink can destroy the pleasant mood of a meal. But an enticing plate of food placed in front of a willing guest can be entrancing. An experienced waiter can guide indecisive diners, turning their entire evening around. The right foods, company, and circumstances cast a positive spell, whether of gaiety, carefreeness, reverie, or joy.
The New Testament refers often to "joy" (in Greek, charà), frequently experienced at meals. A blissful state is encapsulated in many of the brief Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, written nearly one thousand years ago, and most famously in Edward FitzGerald's translation: "Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, / A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou."
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin analyzed the special mood attainable at the table in his gastronomical classic, The Physiology of Taste (published in 1826). Reporting on a lifetime of dinners, closely observed, he consistently suggests that a meal's greatness depends less on particular foods than on achieving an overall mood. His term, le plaisir de la table, has often been translated in the plural as the "pleasures of the table." However, the book's "Meditation 14" discusses a composite "table-pleasure" that one might call "mood." Table-pleasure is "the reflective sensation" (la sensation réfléchie) generated by the thoughtful assembling of foods and people in an appropriate setting. This manifold pleasure of the table is known only to the human race and is largely independent of the drive for food, he writes.
While Brillat-Savarin precludes from table-pleasure ravishments, ecstasies, or transports, the experience, as he sees it, gains in duration what it loses in intensity. Physically, a diner's brain awakens, face grows animated, color heightens, eyes shine, and a "gentle warmth" creeps over the whole body. Morally, the diner's spirit grows more perceptive, the imagination flowers, and clever phrases fly from the lips. At the end of good meal, "body and soul both enjoy a special well-being" (p. 189). Table-pleasure is so powerful that "all human industry" has concentrated on increasing its intensity and duration, he writes. Stomachs may have had limits, but people could improve the accessories. So, they ornamented goblets and vases, ate under the open sky and in gardens and woods, invented the charms of music, and sprayed exquisite perfumes. Dancers, clowns, and other entertainers amused the eyes of diners. To all of these ancient gratifications, his recent contemporaries had contributed exquisite food, dishes so delicate that people would never get up from table if other business did not intrude.
Preferring simplicity to embellishment, Brillat-Savarin asked only four necessities—at least passable food, good wine, agreeable companions, and plenty of time (p. 191). Passing on a recipe for fondue, he recommends memorably: serve the fondue on a gently heated platter, call for the best wine, "and you will see miracles" (p. 417).
At odds with Brillat-Savarin's suggestion that the many elements of a meal generate a composite pleasure is a modern tendency to associate mood with particular foods, drinks, or diets. This view represents a somewhat "medical model" of dining rather than a convivial model, and some food scientists even speak of "functional foods," with druglike uses.
The food and drink industries implicitly market many products as improving mood. Alcoholic drink advertisements appeal to an elevated, "party" mood. The soft drink Coca-Cola is named after two traditional drugs, coca and cola, revealing its origins as an early proprietary "functional food" that still contains caffeine. Cereals manufacturer Kellogg has sold its Strawberry Pop-Tarts—pastries heated in a toaster and aimed at preteens—as a "mood food" by linking the snack to a social setting and a color suggestive of a particular mood (Brandweek [18 March 2002], p. 6). Television commercials showed girls and boys dancing, and the color red predominating, such as a red garland of lights and a girl in a red dress. The product also received placement in the television series Gilmore Girls, in which characters are depicted regularly eating Pop-Tarts for breakfast, suggesting that a single item can summon up a complex social setting.
Meanwhile, other researchers seek to understand why young women in particular crave and binge on sweet snacks in attempts to improve depressed moods. Many get into bulimic cycles of binge-eating and compensating, with accompanying mood swings.
Researchers led by Wesley C. Lynch found in a survey, contrary to expectations, binge eating did not lift depressed and anxious feelings but worsened them. However, moods did improve immediately before and after "compensatory activities," which included not just vomiting, but also fasting, exercise, and the use of laxatives and diuretics that did not decrease, but instead increased significantly following binge episodes and decreased immediately before and after compensatory activities" (Lynch et al., pp. 310–311). One possible interpretation of these findings is that binge eating is not the "problem" except as the prelude to self-punishing or ascetic behavior.
As the advertisers of "mood food" implicitly accept, the product does not act alone but within wider circumstances. A positive mood results most often from a satisfying meal, rich in social interactions. The aim might be to avoid solitary snacking in favor of Brillat-Savarin's nineteenth-century formula of honest viands, good company, and reduced time pressures.
Bibliography
Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations in Transcendental Gastronomy. Translated by M. F. K. Fisher. New York: Heritage Press, 1949. Originally published in Paris as La Physiologie du gout, 1826.
Khayyám, Omar. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia. "Rendered" into English verse by Edward FitzGerald. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1946. Originally translated in 1859.
Lamb, Charles. "Dissertation on Roast Pig." In The Essays of Elia. 1st ser. London: Harrap, 1909. Collection originally published in 1823.
Lynch, Wesley C., et al. "Does Binge Eating Play a Role in the Self-regulation of Moods?" Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science 35, no. 4 (Oct.–Dec. 2000): 298–313.
Somer, Elizabeth. Food and Mood: The Complete Guide to Eating Well and Feeling Your Best. 2nd ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1999.
—Michael Symons
