Food and nutrition are fundamental to all life. In addition to being a source of nutrition, food plays several other roles:
- Spiritual: There are diets for religious and spiritual purposes
- Geographic: There are diets dependent on where people live and what is available to them based specifically on geography, climate, and political resources
- Economic: There are diets dependent on available financial resources
- Physiological: There are diets for medical purposes or to enhance physical and emotional health and well-being
- Social: There are diets for special occasions, holidays, and celebrations
As Micozzi (2011) states, “From birthday cake to bitter herbs of the Passover seder to Thanksgiving turkey to communion wafers, food helps form our social bonds, express our spirituality, and define who we are” (p. 355).
People often maintain specific food habits because they are practical or culturally symbolic. Cultural beliefs that influence nutrition and diet include the following:
- What is regarded as food and what is not
- How food is cultivated, harvested, prepared, and served
- How food is eaten
- Who prepares and serves it
- Which individuals eat together, where, and on what occasions
- The order of dishes served in a meal
Food is also a basic medium through which adult attitudes and sentiments are communicated, since eating can be associated with emotions such as happiness, warmth, love, connection, anger, or tension. Food can also be used as a pacifier and for relaxation, especially when people are under stress. In a movie theater, while watching a suspenseful movie, have you ever noticed the sound of people munching popcorn, eating candy, or sipping on their extra-large soft drinks? Have you ever been frustrated, angry, or bored, and just grabbed whatever was in your kitchen cupboard or workplace snack room and gobbled it up? Seaward (2011) asserts “food and mood go together like peanut butter and jelly” (p. 523).
Food is basic to survival, meets security needs (through storage and hoarding), can be used as gifts or rewards, involves pride and love in its preparation, and can help someone express self-actualization through its innovative use and new recipes. Food ideology is the comprehensive perspective of attitudes, beliefs, customs, and taboos affecting the diet. It is influenced by advertising and involves symbols associated with food such as prestige, power, status, lifestyles, and emotional fulfillment (Leddy, 2006).
Because food habits and associations are learned early in life and tend to be long-lasting and difficult to change, it is important to form sound nutritional practices when one is young.
So much attention is being paid to the role of diet in overall well-being that a new specialty, called “nutritional (or food) psychiatry,” is developing in Western health care. This specialty focuses on the vital importance of food and nutrition in supporting and enhancing health, and it specifically uses food to support and enhance optimum emotional health (Korn, 2016; Miller, 2015; Selhub, 2015). In reality, while this concept is new for Western medicine, many of the world’s major healing traditions (such as traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine) that have been around for thousands of years have emphasized the relationship between diet and health. Even Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine said “Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be food” (Korn, 2016).