CAMDEN — Food isn’t just fuel; it directly impacts our emotions. Award-winning chef and local restaurateur Kerry Altiero will be covering this topic in a talk on Dec. 12 at the Camden Public Library titled “Mood Foods” centering around foods that make us happy, foods that make us sad, and sometimes mad.

If you’re thinking about the calf liver with smothered onions you were forced to eat as a child, that’s not quite the “mad” Alterio means.

“Think of food that’s precious, but soulless,” he said. “Where you look up from the plate and want to say out loud, ‘You can do better than this!’”

Whether it’s bland mac and cheese food at a chain restaurant or an expensive comfort food meal at a hot new joint that fails to deliver, the results are the same.

“Maybe the disappointment is heightened the more you pay,” he mused out loud. “But the essence of this talk is that the more mechanized and robotized and disconnected we are, the more it’s apparent when someone really does care about the food and the customer.”

This is where the “food makes you happy” line of reasoning is going.

“As I’ve often said, at Café Miranda, we do comfort food from around the world,” Alterio said. “There’s a grandma behind every one of our dishes. Farmer Anne Perkins of Head Acre Farm will be joining us for the talk and she’ll talk about what she grows and the pleasure she gets from eating food that goes back to her childhood.”

As Alterio points out, this soil-to-plate connection is even more important now than it was 40 years ago. “We used to have this front porch culture in the 1950s, where everyone sat out on their porches and knew their neighbors; where you had a personal relationship with your seamstress, your butcher, your haberdashery, your department store and soda shop,” he said. “As the decades went by, the houses moved father back on the properties and the front porch culture turned into a more closed-off backyard culture. Fast forward to the advent of the Internet and now we sit in our dark living rooms, plugged into one device or another and order from Amazon.”

“You can’t get a good restaurant quality meal online,” Alterio said with conviction. “And the restaurants, bars and coffee shops used to all be the ‘third’ place people typically went to when they weren’t home or at work. Where’s your third place? Restaurants, bars and coffee shops are still filling that need.”

Join Alterio on Dec. 12 from 12 to 1 p.m. and bring along your favorite mood-food recipe. The talk is sponsored by Destination Wellness, whose mission is to make health and wellness a mainstay of life in Midcoast Maine.

For more information, visit: destinationwellnessme.com

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com