Really what Jenny is saying is that Chinese food is not only all-American, but has become a true American comfort food. There are more Chinese restaurants in America than McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined. Weary interstate truckers love Chinese restaurants because every town has one and the food is always the same. It’s become traditional for Jews to eat at Chinese restaurants on Christmas, which is how, as Jenny puts it, chow mein became the chosen food of the chosen people. Even Baghdad’s Green Zone has two improvised Chinese restaurants for homesick American journalists. “It’s a taste of home,” a foreign service officer deployed in Iraq explains to Jenny. “What could be more American than beer and take-out Chinese?”

This got me thinking about my own comfort foods. There are a few foods that always make me happy. Like Proust’s madeleine, or the vegetable stew that transports the critic back to his mother’s kitchen in Ratatouille, these are foods that whisk me back to my childhood every time I taste them: Pepperoni pizza with Fresca, which my parents, brother, and I used to eat every Friday on the hearth by the fire; blueberry muffins, which I would eat every week after swimming lessons, chewing the paper wrapper long after the last crumbs were gone; peanut butter on toast with orange juice, my father’s morning ritual; Cinnamon Life, a breakfast cereal that was unavailable in Canada and which I got to enjoy only when I visited my grandma in Minnesota; and mint chocolate chip ice cream, which I used to eat with my mom after dinner. I see only in retrospect that four out of the five foods I’ve written have family members inextirpably associated with them.

But that’s exactly how a food becomes a comfort food. As Cornell food psychologist Brian Wansink puts it:

Past associations with products can be cognitively connected with specific individuals (”My father loved green bean casserole,” or “My college sweetheart always mixed M&Ms in with popcorn when we went to the movies”), or specific events (”My Mom always gave me soup when it was cold out or when I was not feeling well”). They also come to be associated with specific feelings that one likes to recall or wants to recapture (”We always got ice cream after we won baseball games as a kid,” or “I always associate Slurpees with carefree summers as a boy”). In some cases, these are vivid iconic instances one can flash on when thinking, tasting, or smelling the food. Yet in all instances, the general feelings evoked—feelings of safety, love, homecoming, appreciation, control, victory, or empowerment—are what underlies the drive toward consumption.

Wansink has uncovered all kinds of remarkable findings in his studies of our comfort food preferences. Men and women have strikingly different tastes in comfort foods: Women prefer sweets, while men take more comfort from hot foods and main meals. Preferences also vary by age: Young adults draw succor from ice cream and cookies, the middle-aged love soup and pasta, while the elderly can’t get enough soup and mashed potatoes. Contrary to popular belief, people seek out comfort foods not just when they’re depressed but also when they’re happy, and people take comfort in different foods during different moods, such as happiness (pizza or steak), sadness (ice cream and cookies), and boredom (potato chips).

A final factor is personality identification. A manly man might feel red meat is a strong, traditional, macho, all-American food, but that soy isn’t. The overarching message is that our tastes don’t develop by accident. “While the French may believe there’s no controlling for taste,” Wansink concludes, “the data disagree.”

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* In case you’re wondering, what Jenny says in Mandarin is, “I started working on this book serveral years ago and now I’m on your television program talking about it.”

This post originally appeared on Brainstorm, at Psychology Today Blogs.