How Food Became Offerings
Submitted by Ellaine Abad
The act of food consumption and eating behaviors is a quality that all humans share in order to survive. The act of food offerings goes back to the era of hunters and gatherers as their means of survival. Over time, along with the increased complexity of food that has developed, the act of sharing and offering different food has become a common theme across all cultures—particularly in Asian culture.
As learned from our previous Valentine’s GBM event—which primarily focused on the ways each member of our executive board experiences love and love languages from our family members—we found that Asian parents and grandparents offering fruit or our favorite food to us is a very common theme across the different cultures that comprise our executive board and general body as a way to express their love for their loved ones. Examples from our GBM include our Treasurer’s mom providing him with a big bowl of fruit whenever he’s home, our Assistant Writing Editor’s parents always cooking her favorite Filipino dishes or soup when she’s under the weather, and one of our Co-President’s father buying their favorite snack or food “in bulk” whenever she expresses interest in it.
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.
Works Cited
Hamburg, Myrte E et al. “Food for love: the role of food offering in empathic emotion regulation.” Frontiers in psychology vol. 5 32. 31 Jan. 2014, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00032
Tower, Roni Beth. “52 Ways: Cultural Variations in Offering Food to Show Love.” PsychologyToday, Sussex Publishers, 17 Sept. 2017, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/life-refracted/201709/52-ways-cultural-variations-in-offering-food-show-love.
