It’s an ideal opportunity to replenish our energy reserves with sustenance
Dogs are pretty clever critters. They can pick up certain words and what they mean by what actions follow afterward. Some dogs will go completely off the wall when someone mentions “food.” And for the OP, it got so bad that he and his family had to resort to using different words for food just to keep the dog calm.
But there’s one very good thing that probably came out of this behavior. The family was forced to open up a thesaurus and look for synonyms for food. To prevent erratic behavior from their dog, they had to use big words while talking around it.