"Food calms me down"

The plainest defence of the visit is that it works. You were wound up, you ate, and you felt better. If it does that, what's the objection?

Let me take the claim seriously and then measure it.

Michael Macht, reviewing how emotions affect eating, listed five different ways they can do it, and one of them is eating to regulate an emotion. So the thing you're describing is real, and the researchers who study eating know it. Food, especially the kind the pull wants, is pleasant, and pleasure crowds out a feeling for as long as the pleasure lasts. The question is how long that is, and what the feeling does in the meantime.

Take the second question first. Feelings have their own clocks. Philippe Verduyn and colleagues had people record their episodes of fear, anger, joy, gratitude and sadness day by day, and how long each lasted. What made a feeling last longer was how important the situation was, how strong the feeling was at the start, and whether the thing that caused it came back, either in reality or in the person's thoughts. Nothing on that list is touched by cheese. The email is exactly as important after the crackers. And going back to the table and reading it again is the reappearance that extends the feeling. The visit doesn't shorten the feeling's life. If anything, it delays the thing that would, which is dealing with the email.

Now the first question. The relief lasts about as long as the eating. There's a study on this that I find persuasive. Heather Scherschel Wagner and colleagues made people feel low with sad films and then gave some of them their own chosen comfort food, some an equally liked food that wasn't a comfort food, some a plain food, and some nothing. Everyone's mood recovered, and it recovered by about the same amount in all four groups. The comfort food did no better than nothing. The authors' phrase for what's going on is that people give comfort food credit for a recovery that would have happened anyway.

I think that describes Wednesday. The dread about the email peaked when you read it and had begun to fall before you reached the fridge, because that's what feelings do. The crackers arrived during the fall and took the credit. If you'd stood at the worktop for four minutes and eaten nothing, you'd have felt about the same at five to four. You'd have missed the pleasure of the first cracker, which I don't deny is a pleasure, and you'd have missed the after, which is not.

So food does calm you down, in the sense that you feel calmer a few minutes after eating. It does it the way a watch that's stopped tells the right time twice a day. The calm was coming. Chapter 17 will ask you to test this yourself, by waiting ten minutes and seeing what the feeling does on its own.