Cathy Guisewite drew a syndicated newspaper comic strip called Cathy from 1976-2010. Guisewite said in 1983 that the comic strip was all about the four basic “guilt groups”—food, love, mother and career. A themed collection of Cathy strips titled Food: A Celebration of One of the Four Basic Guilt Groups was published in book form in 2001.
 
Guisewite started the comic strip at the urging of her mother—one of the four “guilt groups.”
 
   
Wikipedia: Cathy Guisewite
Cathy Lee Guisewite (born September 5, 1950) is an American cartoonist who created the comic strip Cathy, which had a 34-year run. The strip focused on a career woman facing the issues and challenges of eating, work, relationships and having a mother—or as the character put it in one strip, “the four basic guilt groups.”
 
24 April 1983, Los Angeles (CA) Times, “Also Source of Truth, Money: Cartoonists See Their Art as Poor Man’s Poetry” by Robert W. Stewart, pg. WS1:
Guisewite has expanded what she calls the basic universal “guilt groups” to four—food, love, mother and career.
 
Google News Archive
10 May 1983, The Blade (Toledo, OH), “Good, Bad News on TV Program Avenues” by Mike Duffy (Knight News Service), pg. P4, col. 7:
“My life revolves around food, love, mother, career—the four basic guilt groups,” Cathy said.
 
5 October 1983, Dallas (TX) Morning News, ‘The real Cathy sizes up her alter ego” by Chris Dummit, Today, pg. 1C, col. 3:
‘Food, love, mother and career—the four guilt groups—have come more in focus for me in the last seven years,” Ms. Guisewite said during a recent visit to Dallas.
 
Google Books
The Fifth and Far Finer than the First Four 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said:
Presented with a special bonus quote
By Robert Byrne
New York, NY: Fawcett Columbine
1993
312
Mother, food, love, and career are the four major guilt groups.
Cathy Guisewite
 
Google Books
Food: A Celebration of One of the Four Basic Guilt Groups
By Cathy Guisewite
Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Pub.
2001
 
Google Books
And I Quote (Revised Edition):
The Definitive Collection of Quotes, Sayings, and Jokes for the Contemporary Speechmaker
By Ashton Applewhite, William R. Evans III and Andrew Frothingham
New York, NY; Thomas Dunne
2003
Pg. 224:
Mother, food, love and career, the four major guilt groups. — Cathy Guisewite
 
OCLC WorldCat record
Love and Work : 25 years of Cathy comics on two of the basic guilt groups
Author: Cathy Guisewite
Publisher: New York : Gramercy Books, 2004.
Edition/Format:   Book : English