What is Your Favorite Comfort Food?

            In times of crisis most of us have a comfort food.  For me it's been my morning coffee routine.  But in full disclosure, my coffee is really more like hot ice cream than real coffee and its mostly the heat of the mug and the fact that my cat cuddles into my arms while I write, pray, and listen each morning.  The coffee is the catalyst to the whole ritual.

            But in the midst of my crisis and drama in getting going on this journey, there was no coffee, no routine, and no time for my girl cat to sit on my lap.  I went into survival mode and not comfort mode - though a bit of self-comforting can go a long way in times of crisis.

            The point I want to make is that when the immediacy of the crisis passes, the call of the comfort food gets a lot louder.  We need what is familiar and routine and what we know we will have a connection with.  We need some level of success, so we go with what we know works - be it food, alcohol, relationships, or some other form of comfort.

            What drove this idea home and why we really need to think about it was in watching the first and part of the second season of a show called The Colony on the Discovery Channel.  Ten strangers are put in a group and dropped off in a post-apocalyptic environment and told they need to survive.

            Each person had their own set of unique skills and personality to go with them.  Yet in both episodes the same thing happened to this group.  They defaulted into their comfort areas of expertise and missed the bigger picture that emerges in a post crisis moment.

            Neither group sought food!  They built amazing inventions.  They reacted to all the problems that the producers of the show created for them.  But neither group dedicated any real attention to getting a sustainable and regular source of food and sometimes, even water.  They got hungrier, weaker, and less productive - but they still kept up with their comfort skills and projects in the face of death due to lack of food.

            We all have our own coping mechanisms and in that we all share a common thread - when we are stressed we want to go with what we know we can be successful at and tend to ignore what we don't understand or know how to deal with.  These two groups had no farmer among them.  Finding food has never been something they have had to contend with beyond going to the closest grocery store or restaurant.  But if things go bad, it will by only hours before every shelf is bare and every restaurant is closed.

            Survivalists often point out you can go four days without water and 40 days without food.  Right.  That is SURVIVAL; it is not something that works well.  Lack of food and water within one day start to have all kinds of effects on us - we can't think, we are more likely to hurt ourselves, and we grow tired and less productive. It becomes a circle that is hard to escape from once a certain threshold is passed.

           As a society we've lost our connection to food as more than something that gives us comfort - it gives us life and the energy we need to live it.  In my time so far on farms and ranches it has become clear that growing food or having to kill something to eat are not easy nor skills that one learns in a single day.

            I love my comfort food - but I also understand that without food I won't be comfortable.  But if you learn anything from this post I hope it is that if you are in a crisis that is going to last more than a day, you've got to think about food and water first.  It's not something to put off just because you have a few days or few weeks supply of food.  It is a number one priority.