Food as a Love Language
The concept of five love languages was introduced by author and pastor Gary Chapman in the 1990s. He broke down love into these categories: words of affirmation, quality time, acts of service, physical touch, and receiving gifts.
While Chapman expresses his idea of the five love languages in an admittedly heterosexual frame of view and within the romantic relationship framework, that does not mean his theory cannot evolve or be viewed through different lenses. In this case, food has been proposed to be the sixth love language for a number of years now.
Food has always behaved as the glue within a group or society and has a talent for bringing different groups together; it’s an activity that requires no common language. Throughout the world, food can be seen bringing people together. There have been countless food & travel shows that attest to this (Anthony Bourdain being one of the most noteworthy).
As an expression of love, it can be so much more. From spendings hours (or even days, in some cases) preparing a singular dish or sitting around a pile of take-out. Memories such as making sofrito or kimchi from scratch with your family can stay with a person for years. Not simply the tastes and smells, but the emotions that can be found tied to those foods.
A step in the sofrito making process in the home of a Puerto Rican family. Florida, 2021. Frankie Negron.
Artist Christine Petrick of New York explains that to them, “sharing and giving food, whether pre-made or made together, is also a concept of show[ing] admiration or love to another or a group of individuals.”
Throughout 2020, 70% of Americans were preparing most (if not all) of their meals at home due to the quarantine caused by the Coronavirus pandemic. It’s an understandable figure, on a variety of levels. Entire families are quarantined together, and businesses, in some areas of the U.S., were closed entirely. People who may not have cooked at home often or at all found themselves more and more in the kitchen out of necessity; and then to kill time. And after that? Finding new hobbies and ways to express love, like baking.
Thaliah Felix is one of those people; she began baking consistently and experimenting during the past year. Food to her is not only a way to spend time with those that she loves, but to find new ways to express herself.
“It’s something that isn’t usually thought as such since food is such an afterthought nowadays,” shares Thaliah, “but I think due to the pandemic, it’s been a sense of comfort for those who have not been able to see their loved ones as they recreate meals [that] reminds them of those persons.”
Whether as comfort meals or the act of sharing, food isn’t just sustenance. It’s what helps to bind us together.
