Food for Thought: Mother's Milk

So, I was sharing a question that MEK posed on her site a few days ago to someone at work: what is it that makes food comforting?  Now, I framed this question, which has been asked so many times by people in the food industry, I think we might actually be approaching infinity, as the 'million dollar question.'  What indeed?  I think it falls into the category of, "Surely someone has answered this question by now," and no, we haven't... but we continue tirelessly in our attempt.

Aaaaanyway.  The person at work with whom I broached this topic is a person whose job it is to explore these types of emotional/sensory connections people have with food.  She said that a chef she works with at a flavor company has an intriguing hypothesis on comforting food: It all relates back to mother's milk.  Meaning: foods that we find comforting exhibit the same attributes in one way or another as breastmilk.  This relates to formula-imbibers also, because formula is formulated [whew, that felt redundant] based on breastmilk composition.

Let's think about mother's milk for a second, and give that hypothesis some space to really resound.  Attributes that I can think of off the top of my head are:

• Fatty
• Creamy
• Dairy
• Warm - sorry, that gives me the skeeves too

If you ask a food scientist to list "knobs" they can turn in a product to make it more comforting, increasing any of these four factors, either alone or in combination, would be some of the first attributes to be listed.

Is it possible that the idea of "comfort food" is ingrained that early in life?  Personally?  I think so.