One time, I was hosting a masters nutrition group, and one of the women bemoaned the fact that, because of food sensitivities, she couldn’t feed her children the same restorative foods her mother and grandmother had fed her.
For me, the soothing foods I ate when I was sick were pastini (tiny star-shaped wheat pastas) with butter and cottage cheese, and chicken soup. My son Gilbert eats none of these things.
Yet as we discussed in the group that night, healing and comforting foods stem from how they are delivered—with love and nurturance and the intent to doctor an ailment. They are, perhaps curiously, not necessarily the food itself.
If I serve a gluten-free, refined sugar-free cinnamon toast to my son as part of his breakfast, with the same love and sweetness that I remember receiving my cinnamon toast as a kid, Gilbert will likely foster that same appealing memory.
