What's your eating personality?

Judy's 15-year-old son has eaten a peanut butter sandwich for lunch every day since he was four. The last time she suggested something different, he objected. "He said, 'You know, Mom, I have to put up with so much at school; so much is happening and there are so many changes that I just want a lunch that I can count on,'" she says.

"It never occurred to me," says Judy, an excellent cook with diverse tastes in food, "that he was using lunch as comfort, as something familiar that he didn't have to worry about."

Of course, the best reasons to eat are that you're hungry and that you need food for sustenance, and the best way to respond to those needs is to reach for food that tastes good and is good for you. But everyone knows that emotions, fatigue, hormones, some circumstances and events, certain people, boredom and a lot of other factors can sound the hunger bell, so what we end up eating may have less to do with physical needs than it does with psychological ones.

Food, like fashion, can be an expression of personal identity, says Paul Fieldhouse, a professor at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, who has a special interest in the social and cultural aspects of food. "Food is like a language that carries messages - the trick is understanding the code," says Fieldhouse.

"People think that there's some kind of great wisdom of the body that is going to instinctively choose what they need," says Bennett Galef, an eating-behaviour specialist and a professor of psychology at McMaster University in Hamilton, "but that's not true." We do have some instinctive behaviours that go as far back as caveman times, such as gorging when food is available because it may not be for many days. But familiarity and culture (that is, what Mom packed for lunch and our ethnic and regional specialties) reign supreme, says Galef. And eating experiences and personal preferences figure in, too. Our relationship with food -- what and how we eat, our likes and dislikes, our cravings -- can tell us a lot about ourselves. But what? We asked experts to take an educated -- but lighthearted -- look at what our eating habits reveal about who we are.

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