Written by Online therapist Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst, Ph.D.

BISCUITS AND GRAVY

Comfort Food, Memory, and the Patterns We Carry

Sometimes a plate of biscuits and gravy is more than breakfast—it’s a portal. For individuals in Maryland and DC, this reflection explores how food evokes memory, how early adaptations shape lifelong habits, and how emotional healing begins with awareness.

A recent pop quiz that jumped into my Inbox showed a picture of a stack of biscuits, and immediately, I remembered my grandmother making biscuits and gravy for breakfast. What a throwback! Her kitchen was huge, probably the biggest room in the house. Of course, her family was huge, too. All those hands were needed for working the farm, and birth control wasn’t even a ‘word’. The stove was fed by wood, and water was hauled in from the well pump in the middle of the backyard. Biscuits and gravy… daily fuel for the work to come.

Memories of early childhood are truly important for us. You may not realize it, but your brain holds on to our life experiences from birth and possibly before birth. Our brains are a huge database. That database fuels our day-to-day experiences. As a college student, I remember working in the computer lab with these cabinet-shaped units that filled a room and these stiff paper cards with little square holes that you had to use to feed the machine data to analyze. Imagine being able to go through these cards and read your history, release the emotional impact, and free yourself from habits, hurts, and traumas. Going back in time to examine an injury has tremendous value. When we carry these earlier traumas and injuries without examining them, they will impact the present in surprising ways.

A simple illustration of this is “the ham story.” Forgive me if you have heard this before, but here goes: A young wife is preparing a boneless ham for a big family dinner. Before she cooks it, she cuts the ends off and then puts it in the oven. Her daughter asks why she wastes the ends. She replies her mother showed her how to do this. So they ask grandmother, who replies her mother taught her to do it this way. On to the great-grandmother, who replies, “I only had one pan, and I had to cut the ends off to make it fit.”

We all have these early experiences where some resource is missing, and we make an adjustment that becomes a process that we repeat ultimately to our detriment. As we move forward in life, we continue to use this method even when it is not necessary, does not apply, or truly undermines us.

Want to explore how comfort food connects to memory and emotion? Visit Cooknight’s history of biscuits and gravy, Southern Foodways Alliance’s podcast on the emotional life of eating, and WFLA’s science behind comfort food cravings.

If you’re ready to examine the patterns you’ve inherited and rewrite your emotional story, therapy can help. Learn more about individual therapy in Maryland and DC or explore therapeutic approaches that support emotional insight and personal transformation.