WP3: Food as Love
You can’t find my favorite Indian food at any restaurant — even in India. Of course, I didn’t know this as a young child and always asked for it at restaurants up until the age of 11, when I finally came to the realization that spinach and tofu didn’t exist outside our house.
Spinach and tofu was the result of my dairy allergy at a young age. It’s made by replacing the paneer (blocks of hardened cheese) in palak paneer (blocks of hardened cheese in a spinach-based curry) with tofu. It didn’t adorn a fancy name, which should have been the first clue that I couldn’t find it at a restaurant. My mother simply stuck with the basics and named it what it was: spinach and tofu. I fell in love with the dish — it was simple, had the perfect texture, tasted distinctly like my mom’s cooking, and provided the unique, warm sense of satisfaction that only childhood soul food can provide. Despite not being authentic Indian food, spinach and tofu never felt out of place amidst the myriad of the other dishes she made, and it always made the house menu at larger gatherings: chole, rajma, biryani, samosas, and spinach and tofu. Relatives and family friends gradually became accustomed to eating spinach and tofu at our house — it was one of Swati’s (Mom’s) specialties.
Spinach and tofu recently became a unique vessel for exploring my identity, the generational gap between me and my parents, and my mangled relationship with Indian culture. At its core, the dish represents my parents’ experience with immigration: spinach and tofu is the result of forcing their Indian tradition through the sieve of their formative years in America, which was unexpectedly shaped by their younger son’s dairy allergy. Mom could have made me any dairy-free American food as a substitute (I’m thankful she didn’t) but decided to preserve all the culture she could when feeding me. We don’t often reminisce about my childhood days, but when we do, food is a central topic.
World-renowned chef David Chang is the Korean-American owner and founder of the two-Michelin star restaurant Momofuku. Chang’s very own Netflix show, Ugly Delicious, explores worldly cuisines and the stories behind them — each episode unpacks a different food group that most are familiar with. The first episode deals with Pizza, the second episode is about Tacos, and so on. Episode three is titled Home Cooking, and it explores Chang’s family history with food as he helps prepare a Thanksgiving meal for his mother and friends. There are several precious moments where Chang and his mother discuss stories from Chang’s childhood, and many caught my attention with how closely related they were to moments in my life. Halfway through the episode, he recalls to his mother how his friends made fun of him for the “disgustingly” smelly Korean food he brought to school (Ugly Delicious,” February 23, 2018). I watched in awe, thinking back to the strikingly similar experiences I had when bringing spinach and tofu to elementary school lunch. For the entirety of 3rd grade, I hated spinach and tofu because my friend’s made fun of the smell and its non-Western appearance. My mother couldn’t fathom my distaste and the reasoning behind it, but I was too concerned with fitting in at school then eating my family’s comfort food. She didn’t understand my need to be American. For me, the only way of assimilation was the erasure of any other culture. I needed to speak only English (which I did), and eat PB&J’s for lunch. How could Mom ever understand?
As a child, my constant need for eating Western food (and denial of Indian food) was my initial attempt at American assimilation. Lisa Ko, a writer for The New York Times, details this beautifully in her 2017 article What ‘White’ Food Meant to a First Generation Kid, “By cranking up the TV, stuffing ourselves with Velveeta and Steak-umms, we were trying to drown out our own fears, our guilt for the relatives left behind in the Philippines, our economic anxieties and uncertainties. What could be more American than this desperate denial?” (Ko, Lisa. “What ‘White’ Food Meant to a First-Generation Kid.”) Ko picks apart how these foods, growing up in a first-generation household, reaffirmed their claimed identity as Americans, highlighted by the consumer-driven, whitewashed culture that this country is defined by. Ko’s obsession with American food, and occasional negligence of her parents’ cooking, widened the cultural gap between her and her parents, just as it did for me.
My mother and I have a very complicated relationship, and Ko’s article, as well as Chang’s Home Cooking episode, allowed me to unpack it in a way I never previously explored. My mother — understandably — isn’t fluent in English, and my Hindi is nothing short of embarrassing. We don’t have many common interests, and never spent much quality time together when I was growing up. We often butt heads, and as I grew older, our arguments grew increasingly intense: screaming, crying, name-calling going both ways. Some days, it was all-out war. But these fights, no matter how intense, always ended with her cooking and bringing me food. Food bridged the gaps in our relationship, as a silent, powerful vessel of love. Chang’s stories with his mother further reminded me of my mother and I’s relationship growing up, and helped me realize that cooking is my mother’s love language. Oftentimes she couldn’t articulate her feelings accurately in English, and she didn’t always know how to entertain her stubborn, American children that were obsessed with Western culture. There was a clear cultural disconnect between her and us, and food was the bridge. We were raised on different continents with different cultural values, but the food she cooked for us became common ground. Spinach and tofu is a vessel of love, and I often overlooked the care and practice she put into everything she made, every day. Spinach and tofu means the same thing in Hindi and English — a warm meal at the end of the day, meticulously prepared and conscious of food restrictions, saying more than a broken language ever could. When my brother and I decided to start eating meat, Mom went out of her way to perfect chicken curry — a food she couldn’t even eat (or taste when cooking). Although her love wasn’t always verbally communicated, it was sitting right there in front of us, plated beautifully at least twice a day.
My own relationship with food is far from simple. While I do consider myself a “foodie,” allergies and autoimmune diseases have restricted my diet at multiple points in my life. These conditions led to rashes and hair loss that shattered my self-esteem, and doctors never offered a working solution. Taking research into my own hands, I found that many of my problems centered around the food I ate, and every year brought new twists into my diet. Ko, in her article, discusses a similar situation that she believes was caused by her obsession with American snacks, “Eventually, the food I’d gorged on, with its cheery packaging and bright colors, made me sick, and I developed food allergies and chronic autoimmune issues. These days, a slice of pizza or a handful of Doritos will give me hives for weeks.” (Ko, Lisa. “What ‘White’ Food Meant to a First-Generation Kid.”) I could spend a new 10 pages discussing the ethics of the American food industry and its treacherous ingredients, but Ko’s story introduced new nuances to my cultural relationship with food in this country — it’s only fitting that my attempts at assimilation resulted in appearance-based health conditions that became a huge part of my identity. Am I really American, if I can’t even stomach Doritos and pizza? There were years where I couldn’t eat gluten or dairy, and food became more of a chore than something to appreciate. The process was exhausting and discouraging, but there was a silver lining — I was reaffirmed of my mother’s love for me through the food she made. Every time my diet changed, she worked tirelessly to make dishes that suited me and still felt like home, a process that spinach and tofu paved the way for. She ultimately saved my appreciation for food through the process and began to teach me the basics of how to cook for myself, rather than rely on dining halls and restaurants.
Cooking for me is both a passion and a necessity, and has become a unique bridge for me to connect with my culture. This connection has been a lifelong struggle; I grew up embarrassed of the fact that I can’t speak Hindi, and the disconnect intensified each time I had to ask for subtitles or for Uncle to repeat the joke in English. Even my relationship with my grandparents was limited by a language barrier but strengthened by their cooking. Despite the fact that we couldn’t often have meaningful conversations, they always knew the food my brother and I wanted whenever we visited them in New Delhi. My grandmother made a delicious keema, a traditional Indian dish with minced lamb, and it is the only keema I’ll ever eat. My grandfather always prepared extra amounts of kheer, a dessert with rice and sweetened milk. They, unfortunately, passed away a few years ago, but keema and kheer will always live as symbols of the intimate ties I shared with them when conversation wasn’t sufficient for our communication of love. It’s difficult to think about my grandparents and not feel a sense of regret in how little time I spent with them, but keema and kheer are dishes that I’ll carry with me forever. For me, there’s a sense of cultural reclamation in the Indian food I eat — no matter what’s going on around me. It’s a tangible, grounding force of culture that helps me feel at ease with the different cultural parts of my identity, especially when it comes to the disconnect in the relationship I have with my parents, grandparents, and the rest of my extended family.
About a year ago, when COVID first forced everyone home, I approached my mom in the kitchen and asked if she could teach me how to make Spinach and tofu. I quickly learned that she doesn’t measure any ingredient, and knows how to spice dishes simply out of muscle memory. For her, it’s a unique connection to the generations of family cooks that came before her. There are decades of love behind her sprinkle of haldi into the pan, decades of tradition in the way she makes the roti spin when she rolls it out. It was then that I realized the tremendous amount of care that went into making new dishes for me — spinach and tofu and her chicken curry weren’t recipes handed down from generations before, but recipes born out of meticulous care and unconditional love for her children. Whenever I want to spend quality time with my mom, I ask her to teach me how to cook something. Not only am I more connected to her, but more connected to the Indian side of me that I never really felt comfortable with. I could never show off my Hindi or wear my kurtas as a badge of culture, but now I could walk out of the kitchen feeling more attached to the culture I desperately cling to.
I recently sat down with some of my Indian American friends to discuss their experience with this complex cultural identity and found new meaning in their stories. Shantanu, a fellow student at USC who I’ve grown close to over the past two years, mentioned how the Indian American experience is quite new, and we’re one of the primary generations defining what it means to be Indian American (Shantanu x Sumit: Indian American). For the longest time, I felt that attempts at speaking Hindi or cooking Indian food were insufficient jabs at claiming a culture I wasn’t a part of. Similarly, a theme threaded throughout episodes of Ugly Delicious is the conversation against ‘authenticity,’ an overused term when it comes to food and culture. Certain restaurants cling to this idea and attempt to use it to their advantage, as food writer Jaya Saxena points out in his 2019 Eater article about authenticity: “About a decade ago, the most important thing food could be was authentic. ‘Authenticity’ was the buzzword that propelled people to seek out so-called hole-in-the-wall taco joints over Qdoba…Places like Eataly popped up with the promise of ‘real’ Italian ingredients…Could you even be someone who liked food if the food you ate wasn’t authentic?” (Jaya Saxena. “What Did ‘Authenticity’ In Food Mean In 2019?”).
Saxena explores the rise and fall of terms like ‘authentic’ and ‘fusion’ in the restaurant industry, and how that ties into the evolution of certain cuisines, including Indian food, and their interpretation for the “white palate” of America. He mentions how people have explored flavor combinations since the dawn of time, and Chang has a similar take that he explains on the show. Whereas most see definitive lines surrounding ‘authentic’ foods, he sees food as something that is ever-evolving and refutes the concept of authenticity. I decided to supplement these takes with my own research and found that this constant mix of culture gave birth to numerous foods that we see as ‘authentic’: spit-roasted meat for tacos was introduced by Lebanese immigrants in Mexico (Illeana Moore. “Tacos Al Pastor: A Mexican Dish with a Recent History.”), and salmon in sushi was introduced by salmon-lovers in Norway (Jess Jiang. “How The Desperate Norwegian Salmon Industry Created A Sushi Staple.”). Chang’s and Saxena’s takes, combined with the concept Shantanu brought up, transformed what used to feel like hopeless swings at being “Indian” into an empowering form of cultural expression. Rejecting authenticity allowed me to feel more comfortable with my identity as an Indian American, a term that is ever-evolving alongside the cuisine that I associate with it.
Experimenting with Indian flavors and combining them with the non-Indian food that I know how to cook has allowed me to dive deep into that very process of evolution, and feel like a significant part of the Indian American community. Unlike visits to India, temples, or relatives’ houses, a kitchen is a place where I truly feel at home — a place where I can appreciate the centuries of tradition before me and combine it with the flavors of my personal experience in America, all the while maintaining a sense of belonging and empowerment.
The other main way I spend time with my mother is by watching something — usually a cooking show. Chopped, Beat Bobby Flay, and Masterchef are commonplace, but we recently came across Jon Favreau’s Chef on Netflix. The movie follows a top chef’s complicated relationship with his son, who he rarely had time for. The two travel to Florida and start a food truck, and the adventure brings them together in a way they previously hadn’t experienced (Chef. United States, 2014). They didn’t have a language barrier or a generational difference in culture, but food still mended their relationship and became their language of affection. Not only did the movie give me increased faith in Netflix’s recommendation algorithm, but it spoke to my mother and me in a language we understand, and we silently acknowledged, three feet apart on the couch, how food had transformed our relationship for the better. To this day, Chef is one of my favorite movies.
I have a newfound appreciation for the story behind everything I eat, whether at a Michelin star restaurant or a friend’s house. Every ingredient has a unique history and a telling path of how it ended up on your plate alongside every other ingredient in front of you. Combinations of flavor can tell narratives about immigration and cultural identity, just like spinach and tofu does for me. This has inspired me to spend more time in the kitchen, creating my own story for myself and those around me. Food has helped me take new steps in reclaiming important parts of my cultural identity and has allowed me to communicate with my family like no other language ever could.
WORKS CITED
Chang, David. “Ugly Delicious.” Episode. 1, no. 3, February 23, 2018.
Chandra, Sumit, and Shantanu Jhaveri. Shantanu x Sumit: Indian American. Personal, July 8, 2021.
Chandra, Sumit, and Pavan Garidipuri. Pavan x Sumit: Indian American. Personal, July 10, 2021.
Chef. United States, 2014.
Jiang, Jess. “How The Desperate Norwegian Salmon Industry Created A Sushi Staple.” NPR. NPR, September 18, 2015. https://www.npr.org/2015/09/18/441530790/how-the-desperate-norwegian-salmon-industry-created-a-sushi-staple.
Ko, Lisa. “What ‘White’ Food Meant to a First-Generation Kid.” The New York Times. The New York Times, April 6, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/opinion/sunday/what-white-food-meant-to-a-first-generation-kid.html.
Saxena, Jaya. “What Did ‘Authenticity’ In Food Mean In 2019?” Eater. Vox Media, December 3, 2019. https://www.eater.com/2019/12/3/20974732/authentic-food-definition-yelp.
Moore, Illeana. “Tacos Al Pastor: A Mexican Dish with a Recent History.” Historical Mexico. Sam Houston State University. Accessed July 23, 2021. https://historicalmx.org/items/show/112#:~:text=The%20origins%20of%20tacos%20al,searching%20for%20better%20economic%20opportunities.
