many course meal.

Sixteen days from now, I will be twenty-eight years old. To me, this seems like way too late in the day to change direction, to consider that I might want to – and potentially could – step off my current path and onto another one, jostle among the pilgrims already there and find my place in line. There is fear even as I think about it now, and that fear is stifling my voice. Maybe if I don’t put the words to paper, I won’t have to do anything about what they’re proposing.

For a long time now (longer than I care to admit), I’ve convinced myself that nothing really interests me deeply enough to devote the better part of every day to it. It’s not that I lack curiosity. It’s more that my curiosity flits from flower to flower like a bee that can’t decide what it wants for lunch. I’m constantly dining at a buffet, enjoying much of my meal, but unable to decide what I like enough to go back to for seconds. I’ve suspected that I would ultimately come home to writing, my faithful companion who has donned many robes over many years, always willing to rekindle our romance even after long periods of ignoring and sidelining on my part. But to write, one needs something to write about. To express, and to express authentically, I need to care enough about something to have an opinion. I need to be curious enough to engage with it, to let it simmer like a pot of beans on an open flame, stirring and checking for salt, seasoning it with spices and watching as the hours tick on, and it transforms into something beyond itself.

Looking back now, the number of culinary and alimentary metaphors I use every time I put pen to paper should have clued me in a long time ago. Things unfold just as they do, however, and a few days ago, somehow, miraculously, the fog lifted momentarily. I was near the end of a YouTube video on the history of clotted cream (a dish I’ve never tasted but now cannot wait to try – hey England, if you were going to give my country the wonderful gift of intergenerational postcolonial trauma, a side of clotted cream would have been nice), when it hit me that I love food. I am deeply interested in food. This is a fact that I’ve always known, of course, but the professional implications and potential of that knowledge had, until that moment, eluded me. I didn’t realize that I could write about it.

Why it’s taken me so long to get here, I cannot yet say, but the question deeply fascinates me. Perhaps it has something to do with how, for much of history, a woman’s relationship with food (especially in the Global South) has been restricted to the everyday kitchen, and has been shaped by concerns of daily necessity and duty, not by art, interest or professional aspiration. Perhaps it has to do with years and years of internalized fatphobia and emotional eating, constantly alternating between feeling like I could never be skinny enough, and that only eating could make the big bad thoughts go away. How could food possibly viewed as a source of joy and intellectual nourishment in such a hostile environment? It might also have something to do with the fact that while I have read countless books on nutrition, food history and food culture, and spent endless hours on documentaries, YouTube videos and blog content that center food, I relegated all these pursuits to the realm of distractions, as tools that allowed for procrastinating real work. After all, the aforementioned colonial trauma taught my Indian parents well that work (or whatever one does full-time) is not meant to be interesting – it is a means of survival, of accumulating wealth, and a way to “make it”. If it happens to be interesting and fulfilling, that’s just good fortune. Sort of like arranged marriage, in my admittedly under-informed opinion. Or maybe, just maybe, it was something I knew all along, and chose to protect from capitalistic impulses that would strip it of any joy and meaning. Maybe deep down, I’ve simply been terrified of my innocent interest being tainted by the scalding marks of failure. If I engaged with it in a purely consumptive – as opposed to productive – manner, then that leaves little room for failure. These may all be contributing factors in their own right; this meal has many elements, and I hope to be able to deconstruct each of them down the road.

The fact remains that until now, something has prevented me from recognizing that I could engage with this phenomenon of eating in greater depth, creatively even. But now I’ve gone and done it – I’ve opened Pandora’s box, tasted Hugh Grant’s love heroin from Notting Hill, and nothing else will do. It should be said at this point that I still see myself as fairly non-deluded (foolish, perhaps?). If anything, I view my general existence as a slightly jaded, cynical one. I don’t think I’m very likely to fall for some grand myth that there is a single professional calling (a career soulmate if you will) for every individual and that once we find it, caring will come easily. In fact, I strongly believe that such sentiments have been backed and propagated by modern capitalism, in order to absolve itself of any responsibility for the joylessness that people encounter day after day, seemingly with increasing frequency. After all, if meaningful, productive labour towards something we deeply care about is the only thing that can bring joy and fulfillment to our lives, then only we ourselves are to blame when we feel uncomfortable, unwilling, uninterested and unhappy.

So no, I don’t think that the clouds have finally cleared and that the sun’s rays will now shine upon me endlessly. I see myself battling the same demons day after day, and perhaps newer, scarier ones in the future. I see myself procrastinating and not trusting my ability to see this through. My therapist can safely rely on a constant stream of income for the foreseeable future, at least from one of her clients. Only now, alongside all that, I also have something that sparks a little rush of pleasure in me when I think about it. I have chanced upon something that feeds me, and I’m curious to see what would happen if I continue eating off that plate.

I don’t have a map or a plan laid out. This is going to be a space for my thoughts to stretch their legs and chat about around a little bonfire on a cool Fall evening. Maybe an interesting conversation will unfold, or maybe it won’t, but there will be plenty of warm food and drink to go around. I want to write like I want to cook – frequently, even if falteringly. I may not always have all the ingredients I think I need, or worse, I may have them and forget to use them. I may not get my wok hot enough, or I may not use as much oil as the browning mushrooms in it call for. Still, I want to write (and cook) with courage and curiosity, and respect whatever ends up on my plate enough to eat it and be nourished by it. My writing will be mostly about food, but also about what food inspires and is inspired by. Just like what comes off my stove, some pieces will be first drafts, and some will be carefully refined over time. Regardless, with every sentence I write, I will learn a little bit about the world and a little bit about myself. What’s in it for you, reader, I will never know.