The Psychology of Food: Attachment, Sharing, and Nostalgia in PsychCrunch with Andrea Oskis

In this PsychCrunch episode, Emma Barrett chats with Andrea Oskis about how the foods we eat and share reveal who we are. They explore how sharing food can boost empathy and trust, how attachment shapes our relationship with meat and kitchen spaces, the mood effects of sourdough bread, and the role of nostalgia and multisensory cues in shaping our meals. The conversation weaves together Greek heritage, gender norms around meat, and classic psychological concepts like attachment theory, first encounters, and the hot sauce paradigm as a playful lens on social dynamics at the table.

Introduction and restaurant setting

The episode opens with Emma Barrett introducing Doctor Andrea Oskis, a food writer and psychology lecturer, who is invited to a PsychCrunch restaurant to discuss the psychology of food. The hosts frame the discussion as a planned meal that will illuminate theory, research, and practice around how we eat, who we are, and how we love. The setting is an outdoor, busy city centre, with an emphasis on people-watching and social dining as a backdrop to psychological ideas about attachment, relationships, and routine at the dinner table.

As the dialogue unfolds, Andrea emphasizes that we all tell our stories differently through our food, and that food can act as a narrative vehicle for attachment and connection. The host and guest use the imagined restaurant format to anchor a broader discussion of how the social context of eating interacts with psychological processes, including comfort eating, identity, and cultural heritage.

"sharing food is a good thing, it links to increased empathy, trust, cooperation, and closeness between people" - Andrea Oskis

Starter: hummus, sharing and attachment

The starter chosen by Andrea is hummus with crudités, chosen to foreground food sharing around the table. She explains that sharing food in the middle of the table can foster empathy, trust, cooperation, and closeness—key social bonding processes. She also connects sharing to attachment theory, noting that attachment style—secure, anxious, or avoidant—can influence how people respond to shared food and how they perceive the kitchen and dining space as part of their attachment landscape. This section also touches on how kitchen space itself can be an arena for identity, particularly around gender roles and tradition, and how different upbringings shape our relationships with cooking and eating spaces.

"sharing food is a good thing. The big picture tells us that whatever it is, whether it's tortilla chips and salsa, or hummus and crudité, it links to increased empathy, trust, cooperation, and closeness between people" - Andrea Oskis

Main course: kebabs, meat attachment and cultural context

The main course centers on kebab as a culturally rich, grilled-meat dish, with Andrea extending the discussion to meat attachment—a concept borrowed from attachment research. She introduces the meat attachment scale as a real construct that helps explain why giving up meat or shifting toward less meat can be challenging due to long-standing bonds and trust with meat as a familiar food source. The conversation also weaves in gender and identity, noting how meat has been historically linked to masculine identities and how social spaces like patios and kitchens contribute to evolving food practices. She discusses sourdough and bread as examples of how traditional foods intersect with attachment, while also highlighting how trust in familiar food remains strong across generations and cultures.

"the meat attachment scale is a real thing, and it does hinder a change in consumption habits" - Andrea Oskis

Bread and mood: sourdough and sensory engagement

The discussion then turns to bread, specifically sourdough, and the mood states that making bread can evoke. Andrea cites research showing that hands-on bread-making can increase alertness and excitement, tying the sensory-rich dough activity to mood enhancement through multisensory engagement. She contrasts this with watching bread being made on video, which did not yield the same psychological benefits, underscoring the importance of doing rather than merely observing in a multisensory activity. The conversation also touches on attachment to bread and even the playful image of sourdough starters as child-like objects of care, linking back to broader attachment theory and the psychology of everyday routines around baking in the home.

"participants experienced increased alertness and excitement" - Andrea Oskis

Chilli sauce and social dynamics at the table

The hot sauce paradigm is introduced as a classic psycholinguistic framework for examining aggression following social rejection. Andrea explains how rejected individuals may allocate hot sauce to others, reflecting rejection sensitivity and social threat processing. This segment uses the food context as a playful yet rigorous lens on how social dynamics at the table can reveal underlying affective and cognitive processes, such as how people calibrate responses to perceived social slights and how care and empathy can buffer negative social experiences at meals.

"the hot sauce paradigm is such a lovely experimental paradigm in psychology" - Andrea Oskis

Sweet endings: dessert, nostalgia, and perceptual contrast

Andrea and Emma discuss dessert as a site for nostalgia and expectation effects. The strawberry mousse example is used to illustrate how visual presentation can shape perceived sweetness through dynamic contrast, with a round white plate enhancing perceived sweetness relative to plates of other shapes or colors. The discussion also connects to Charles Spence's crossmodal research on multisensory dining, illustrating how sight, smell, and texture co-create taste experiences. Andrea shares her nostalgic dessert choice of strawberry mousse with vanilla ice cream and reflects on the role of nostalgia and memory in shaping dessert preferences, including how personal histories influence today’s choices and expectations at the table.

"a round white plate made the strawberry mousse taste the most sweet" - Andrea Oskis

Conclusion: attachment theory, Mary Ainsworth, and the personal in psychology

The closing portion returns to theoretical foundations, including Mary Ainsworth’s work on attachment during feeding interactions. Andrea argues that food itself does not cause attachment; rather, the dyadic interactions during feeding shape attachment processes. She discusses Bowlby’s early reception of attachment concepts and highlights how psychologists bring their own experiences into their work, including the implications of gendered kitchen spaces and evolving social norms around food and identity. The conversation ends with thanks and an invitation to continue exploring the intersection of food, psychology, and everyday life.

"What Mary Ainsworth was doing was her observational work on mothers and babies and looking at what happens during the interaction of feeding" - Andrea Oskis