As we quarantine with macaroni and cheese, meat and potatoes, and other high-calorie comfort foods to ride out the pandemic, let’s pause to give a moment’s thanks to Liza Minnelli. In 1970, the young actress was perhaps the first—and certainly the most glamorous—to coin the modern usage of the now-well-worn phrase, comfort food. “Comfort food is anything you just yum, yum, yum,” she told syndicated newspaper food columnist Johna Blinn, smacking her lips together. She was daydreaming of a hamburger with all the fixins.
Before Minnelli, comfort food had been the bland fare of the young, the elderly, and the ill. In the decade after, the two words grew slowly into an inescapable food fad, and now, a half-century later, comfort food has become the trend that will never end.
role: Author outlet: JSTOR Daily publication date: May 2020 category:Food
