Food cues are all around us at all times and they usually make us want to eat more. I thought I would post about one of my favorite dishes to make as well as examine the food cues associated with this dish in my life since I always make it when my whole group of friends get together. This dish would be my brownies!

My Brownies are made from scratch; no Betty Crocker boxes are allowed here! They are extremely time consuming and are a lot of hard work, but they are definitely worth it. Having to melt the chocolate just right and even deciding what kind of chocolate I want to use can take up a lot of time. I’m not going to post my whole recipe because I did make it myself, but I will always make them upon request.

This brings me to the food cue portion of this post. Am I the food cue? Are my friends the food cues? Are we all the food cues? When they come back from school, I want to do something for them to make them happy. A lot of them are having trouble adjusting to school and a nice treat always lifts everyone’s spirits! So perhaps they are a food cue for me to make and eat this dish. I had already planned on making the brownies for them since I always do when our whole group gathers (there are about 20 of us, so it’s rare when we can all come together). This would mean that they are a food cue for me. However, some of them asked me to make them as well. So not only are they food cues for me, but I’m also a food cue for some of them. The fact that the thought of hanging out with me makes them think of brownies means I am a definite food cue to them.

Another element of these brownies is commensality. The brownies aren’t just delicious treats and evidence of food cues, they are a method of sharing between my group of friends. The brownies will be on the table and around them will be all of us talking, sharing stories, and reliving memories. Perhaps these brownies will even be the reason we recall some memories, like the time I made them for the cast party after a lot of us were in our school’s drama production of Our Town. Not only are we being brought together with the brownies, but we are being brought together because of brownies. I guess you could say food does a lot more than satisfy hunger.

(The link in the beginning is a short explanation of food cues and how you can try to avoid some of the more common ones!)