Last weekend, I walked into Counter Culture for something sweet to eat. The café's signature cinnamon rolls sat hunched in their tray, nestled beneath mantles of icing like angels drowsing in a sugar coma. "Is there one in particular that you'd like?" asked Ann, the young woman behind the counter. I laughed and told her to surprise me. "No, you don't understand," she said, reaching for one with her spatula. "Selling baked goods is like running a pet adoption service. People get very emotional about pastry."

As she rang up my order, we discussed the dueling merits of warm brownies: cakey versus fudgy, chewy edges versus gooey centers. "I finally just started asking people what they want," she explained. "But a couple of days after I started doing that, a regular came in and snapped, 'Listen, I just want my muffin and I don't want any questions!' " You can rarely please everyone, and it's even harder to do so when it comes to foods that people are opinionated about. And people tend to form the strongest opinions about things to which they are emotionally bound.

Unlike those who turn to food for comfort during times of anxiety or grief, I can't eat much when I'm upset. Stress turns my stomach into a tireless battlefield. This means trying to make smarter choices about what little I do eat and ensuring that it's both nourishing and stomach-settling. Though I'm saddened for anyone who uses food to emotionally self-anaesthetize, it's worth remembering that food can be medicine — the smart kind — and that we all need to eat.

Appetite has always been a good barometer of emotional well-being for the women in my family, and when the sailing is smooth, our fridges and fruit bowls tend to brim with the good stuff. But October presented some unexpected challenges, and extra fretting had caused my lunchtime hunger pangs to wane before I boarded my first-ever Southwest Airlines flight a few weeks ago. Steam billowed from the black coffee I'd requested, but I wasn't interested in the snacks that came with it, and passed them along instead to the woman seated next to me, who had ordered hot cocoa and had been dabbing at her eyes throughout the flight. She thanked me, then opened a packet and smacked on her peanuts while embarking on a misty-eyed diatribe about a friend whose funeral she was en route to attend, pausing only to ask the flight attendant for more nuts. She ate these nuts in a distracted, birdlike way, focused and mechanical.

"Comfort food" in restaurants, as abiding a trend as it's been, carries nothing in the way of nostalgic value to anyone lacking exposure to classic culinary Americana, which is not to say that those things can't be delicious. But I've been to restaurants where I was told to order the mac and cheese, only to later surmise that its charms preclude most people who weren't raised on the stuff from the blue box.

But the golden rules that separate good pot roast from bad pot roast can be a lot harder to debate than the difference between a well-prepared piece of tuna and a poorly prepared one. When it comes to food, nowhere do we differ more from our contemporaries than the sentimental values and emotions we ascribe to what we grew up eating, what we want to eat, and what we end up with. In her essay "Nursery Food," Laurie Colwin writes of having food cooked for her by her best friend while mourning the loss of her father: "When I got to the table I realized that this angelic pal had made shepherd's pie. My eyes swam with tears of gratitude. I did not know that shepherd's pie was just what I wanted, but it was just what I wanted."

For some, the line between emotional eating, comfort food and cravings can be blurred, and imbalanced hormones can further complicate the signals that our body sends us. There's room for both antioxidant-rich chicken soup and the occasional large sundae on my spirit's nutritional agenda. It's natural to forge emotional attachments with food that can eclipse our better judgment. The concept of comfort food is founded on it. We set objectivity aside in favor of the things for which our souls cry out, even if it means that we're not always proud of what turns up.

Nouf Al-Qasimi is a freelance writer living in Santa Fe. Send e-mail to food@q.com.