What’s the relationship between a family’s stress and their food consumption?
A running gag in the iconic Telugu movie Pokiri is the heroine’s family seemingly surviving on upma. It’s what they eat for breakfast and pack in their lunch boxes. While this may seem innocuous and funny, especially given society’s collective (undue!) disdain for upma, it paints an insightful picture when placed in the family’s context.
Sruthi, the heroine, is the sole breadwinner of her family — her father is dead and her mother runs the home, taking care of Sruthi and her younger brother. Without a male ‘head of the household’, the family lives in constant fear — police officials make aggressive efforts to physically assault Sruthi while neighbors make ‘friendly’ incursions into their personal lives. At one point, a high-ranking corrupt official threatens the heroine’s mom that he would file a brothel case against her unless Sruthi agrees to be his mistress.
Personal experience tells that its natural for people living in such tense, uncertain scenarios to hunker down and enter survival mode. Even if one has the energy, it is inefficient to plan for non-essential things given the uncertainty of life. For all you know, you might not even be home tomorrow to use the grain you soak today. Its rational, even, to bank on food like upma that comes to life without any grandiose arrangements.
This leads to a fascinating conclusion: the food a family eats, i.e., their gastronomical state, could be a proxy for the family’s socio-mental state—adjusted for their personal tastes, willingness to spend time and energy, controlled for purchasing power and relative stress among cooking family members. Basically, where a family falls in the spectrum between having nutritious well timed meals per day and eating upma with yesterday’s rasam for breakfast at 3PM — and in extension how well functioning the family is.
But of course, this could just be confirmation bias.
If we add the nuance of buying or having their food made for them — its equally plausible to imagine the opposite — of people splurging on and craving for good food because — well, when a family seems to be spiraling, a good meal doesn’t hurt.
Sometimes, a good meal is also a way to keep the collective or a particular family member’s spirits up. In fact, in the legendary 1948 movie Bicycle Thieves, a father spends his last remaining cash on a good meal for his son and himself at a pizzeria when he realizes that they have lost all chances of finding their stolen cycle and in extension, all hopes of a good, stable life.
Or perhaps, the relationship is not linear and inverts at the crescendo of stress, when life cannot possibly get worse — like the opening scene of the movie Mallesham when a family of four commits suicide by having their favorite biryani mixed with poison when their debt burden spirals out of hand.
On average then, it is possible to construct a stress — food curve at a family and population level, perhaps segmented by socially and culturally homogenous groups. Perhaps there is no causation; or even a correlation. Theoretically, there would be different cohorts , each with a unique stress — food curve.
Establishing this will help triangulate the relation between mental health and food, improving understanding of the stress response of families — which does not seem to be as well researched as stress response of individuals.
Applications of such research can follow either direction: from food to families or from families to food. Both of which are crucial as mental health and right nutrition become pressing issues of our increasingly uncertain times.
