What does it mean to dream about food?
Food pictures need and nourishment, emotional as well as physical, and whether you feel satisfied or lacking.
Four ways to read it
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream.
Freud
Freud read eating and hunger in dreams as picturing appetite and the taking in of what one desires, with roots in the earliest oral pleasures of infancy. The food and the act of eating stand for satisfaction sought.
Freudian reading (our summary).Jung
For Jung eating images taking something into the self and making it part of you, whether nourishment, knowledge, or experience. What is eaten, and whether it satisfies or sickens, pictures what the psyche is trying to assimilate.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
Cognitively food pictures need, nourishment, and fulfillment, emotional as well as physical. A satisfying meal tracks contentment or connection; hunger or spoiled food can track a sense of lacking something the dreamer needs.
Continuity hypothesis (our summary).Mythological
Food binds and transforms in myth: the feast that creates kinship and obligation, the forbidden fruit, the food of the otherworld that holds a visitor there, as the pomegranate seeds bound Persephone to the underworld. To eat is to be changed and bound.
Bulfinch; Frazer.