How Food Became Offerings

Of course, our club’s size isn’t big enough of a sample size to generalize this finding for the entire Asian population, but from our personal experiences and outreach to other Asians, it does seem as though food offerings in Asian communities is an important part of our culture as a whole. However, a psychological study of offering food to others as an act of service to others, otherwise interpreted in our terms as a type of love language, has been researched to determine how interpersonal food offering plays a role in empathic emotion regulation during development. This research article finds that food offerings becomes a means of “coping with distress and empathetic concern” and “a means of social support”, resulting in an “increas[ing] positive affect for both the recipient and provider,” in terms of interpersonal interactions and relationships (Hamburg et al.). In another article, the authors emphasize that variations in food offerings and attitudes towards food is “culturally based” because, “some countries embrace food and feeding as the glue that binds families together; others condemn enthusiasm about eating as gluttony and greed and see sharing meals with others as optional.” (Tower). Both articles also attribute their findings to intrapersonal relationships with food. From these findings, it is psychologically supported that food offerings contribute to human development and is suggestive of why this is such an evolved, but common, action between all humans regardless of their cultural background.