I Am What I Don’t Eat

On my relationship with food as a girl who grew up thin.

Sometimes I worry about the relatability of my writing. Not everyone hesitates to introduce themselves by the work that they do, not everyone questions the institution of marriage without questioning their own, and not everyone struggles with which place to call home (for most, it is quite tangibly where the heart is). But that’s not a worry that weighs on me as I begin to write this piece. The subject of food is relevant to us all, because everyone eats. Food is no longer simply a means of survival; it is a significant character in the story of our lives.

In this piece, I attempt to take you through my relationship with food as a girl who grew up thin, exploring the psychosocial nuances of this relationship, its effect on my mind, on my body, and on my place in this world. To trace the genesis of all things, we must go back to the beginning of time.

Here’s taking you to the beginning of my time.

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Lunchtime at School

Photo by Freddy G on Unsplash

When I was five years old, my parents decided that I was going to the wrong school. Whenever I tell this story, I tell it quite simply. My paediatrician had declared that I wasn’t gaining weight as I ought to, and to set me on the path to good health, my parents had to make sure I was eating enough. My trouble with eating had something to do with the school I was going to, and, so, I was made to switch schools.

The school I had been going to–let’s unimaginatively call it School A–started early and finished late. This meant that I wouldn’t be home until much after lunchtime, the lunchtime about which I’ll never have anything nice to say. 

In the name of serving us lunch, the school would seat us in a row on straw mats that lined the hard floor. Within seconds, a plateful of rajma chawal would appear before every student. It was the same kind of plate with the same serving size of the same food for every child, whom they mistakenly believed to be alike in their needs and preferences. But maybe they weren’t entirely mistaken, because the kids to my left and to my right would gladly devour the meal and dart to the playground or wherever, because in the throes of a carefree childhood, what’s more fun than having fun? I, on the other hand, sad and solitary, would remain seated before the heap of rice, tears silently rolling down my face, only to plop into the pile of untouched food. 

When the teacher overseeing the meal service would take notice, they would sit beside me, not to comfort me, but to coax me to eat. It wasn’t enough to eat your food; you weren’t allowed to leave until you had finished every last bit of the serving. To be compelled to polish off your plate is not uncommon in a culture with a defining history of scarcity. 

I would struggle to eat, stuffing my mouth with spoonfuls, but those lumps of rice would sit dryly in the corner of my mouth, until I would violently eject them, a gag induced by the kind of grief and helplessness you feel in your bones. And, so, I began to believe that I hated food. I had little reason not to believe that, because the adults around me would routinely comment on my frailty, on how terribly underweight I was, on how shocking it was that I didn’t eat a thing!

But of course this wasn’t true. There were some things that I liked to eat very much. Mass manufactured, profusely processed foods were beloved to me. I would hungrily rip open the packaging, gobbling up the snacks just as quickly as they had been produced. I would eat unusually large portions of restaurant-style food, and scant servings of anything that tasted oh-so-bad, which surely had to mean that it was good for me. 

Among my many eating-out escapades, there’s one I distinctly recall. I was dining at a Sichuan restaurant with my extended family, sometime in the year 2003. An hour into the meal, I had consumed a plateful of noodles doused with gravy, an appetiser or two, a bowl of thick soup, a bamboo steamer of dimsum, and I was now eagerly perusing the menu for more. It was then that one of my uncles remarked that I only ever eat “either like an ant or an elephant”. Until then, the unanimous opinion had been that I barely eat. At home, I was unmistakably the ant. The contents on my plate dictated the nature of my appetite, which vacillated between gargantuan and measly. 

Halfway through first grade, after I had spent a couple of years rejecting the food offered at School A, I found myself at School B. School B had better hours and it was a stone’s throw from home. Despite that, the transition was fairly traumatic. 

In English class at School A, we were just about learning to inscribe “Cat Bat Sat” on the unruled pages of our notebook, the oversized lettering of those three words filling up the days of our lives. In School B, I was plunged into lengthy lessons in literature and weekly tests to assess my ability to learn by rote. You were what you could remember. Ironically, the only things I remember from then are not the ones I was taught, but how those days made me feel.

At School A, I was a chatty kid, gently reprimanded for talking too much during class. At School B, which happened to epitomise post-colonial aspirations, students were berated for speaking their own language. Watching my classmates struggle with the English words for sundries like box and bottle, I refrained from revealing my fluency in the language. And, so, at School B, I turned into a mute alien. On the rare occasion that I was asked to speak, I would pretend to have trouble constructing a sentence in English, my flailing attempt at normalcy. I was pitiably frail and awkwardly tall, made to stand at the very end of the line at Assembly, which oddly mimicked the feeling of being ‘last’. With a perpetually runny nose and a constitution that betrayed my dietary intake, I would easily faint under the hot sun, the summer of Delhi exacting a toll on my system. On those weekly tests, I would repeatedly have myself pronounced a dimwit, because I didn’t follow what was going on. I was the proverbial weirdo. 

At recess, the raucous kids would play, boisterously shoving each other and screaming at the top of their lungs. My eardrums ached from the insufferable noise, and my heart desired silence and solitude. In the midst of this play would emerge their lunchbox. Most kids were so hungry that not only did they quickly finish their tiered lunch box that contained congealed instant noodles and paratha-achaar, but they then pounced on their friends’ lunches in search of something to their liking. This inspection, this invasion of privacy, was too much for me to endure. Even the weird child wasn’t exempt from the ravenous assault. 

I dreaded nothing more than recess. Those twenty minutes felt nothing like the “break” that they called it. I was the only one who never left her assigned seat in this period. After a couple of attempts to pull out my comparatively small portion of lunch—a slice of brown bread laced with peanut butter—the embarrassment got the better of me. The kids didn’t recognise the “brown thing” that was peanut butter, their meanness sometimes veering toward their scatological obsessions. It’s not that my family didn’t try their luck with numerous other snack options, but it didn’t matter, because I had stopped opening my lunchbox. Every day, I brought the lunchbox back home, uneaten, unopened, a habit I would continue for many years to come. I stayed hungry at school until I got accustomed to ignoring that sensation altogether. My first bite of food of the day was always and only at home.

From School B, I would return home in time for lunch, so there was at least the possibility of me eating something. I would walk through the door, and head straight to the fridge for my fix of packaged sweetened fruit juice—the drink was refreshingly chilled, and it was 45 degrees (Celsius) outside! I would pounce on the plate of homemade french fries with great longing. Upon having eaten, I felt like myself again. I was miserable at school right until the end, and the assurance of returning home every day was the only solace.

So, some years later, when my family moved out of that home, the first instance of moving home in my life, I felt unimaginably dislocated. It didn’t matter that we were moving into what was unanimously described as the most palatial living arrangement in Delhi.

Let’s now jump to 2003, just as I’d have liked to do back then.

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The Palate of My Teens and Twenties

Now in our teens, many of my peers were gaining weight. Hormones, inactivity, overconsumption; you can blame whatever you like, because that’s what they did. In the meanwhile, thanks to my genetic propensity, I remained thin. The male gaze assured me that I was lucky, that I was desirable, and so, my thinness became my badge of honour. I almost forgot to mention that although I was thin, I had regained my vigour and I was no longer sickly.

Then came the year 2009, in which I turned twenty and graduated from college. Mired in the confusion of not knowing what to do with my life—except that I wanted to write (but when has that ever been deemed something worth doing?)—I found myself at an advertising firm, writing copy for an obscure audience. The only two things that I gained from that stint was the clarity that I never wanted to write ads again, and a bunch of great friends with whom I ate lunch everyday.

At the teeming office cafe, we would each unravel the contents of our packed lunch. Where my friends brought dal-chawal-sabzi in their tiered steel lunch boxes that are strikingly synonymous with Indian lunches, I carried a peanut butter sandwich sealed in a ziploc bag. I was the anomaly in the group, my distinctness heavily borrowed from the food that I ate. There’s no debating that a sandwich is a more convenient option than curried preparations of veggies and lentils, but it also served two other purposes for me. One, I never quite fancied the flavours and textures of Indian cuisine, so the simplicity of peanut butter and bread was great, and two, it is difficult for me to stomach an elaborate meal in a public setting. Much of my appetite comes to life only when I feel at home. In an office setting, this is nearly impossible. 

The Relativity of Size: Being fat and thin on the same day

Body shaming discourse tells us that skinny shaming and fat shaming are equally bad. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that skinny shaming isn’t really, really bad; but is it just as bad as fat shaming when the culture subtly rewards your thinness?

When I was seventeen, I was both thin and fat. I had two sets of friends, one among whom I was the skinny girl, and another for whom I was the big girl, a threat to the self-effacing core of femininity. 

The friends who thought I was fat happened to be petite. One time, at an impromptu sleepover at one of their homes, I found myself without a change of clothes. My friend offered me one of her oversized t-shirts, but quickly retracted the offer because of course her small clothes wouldn’t fit my large body. 

For the group of friends who thought I was slim, the response was always a mix of admiration and envy. After all, we were only ever expected to aspire to be as small and as insubstantial as possible, so much so that it would be great if we disappeared altogether.

The question that I will always ask, though, is how the same body could appear so different to different groups of people on the very same day. It would have been interesting if I could leave you to guess what I actually looked like back then, but I must further the argument on the relativity of size. At most retail brands, I have been a size S, a size L only as many times as a size XS. Despite what clothing brands have us believe, there’s no such thing as a standard size, let alone a size good enough to fit everyone’s bill. It’s a pity that the ability to fit into mass produced clothing is aspirational, commonly promoted as a marker of health and fitness.

I can thank whatever I like—the genes, the metabolism, god’s grace—the shape of my body didn’t quite betray my eating habits in my teens and twenties. I could get away with pints of ice-cream and bottomless bags of chips without it being seen on my body.

It was only around the age of twenty-nine that I noticed a change. I developed a peculiar case of gastrointestinal bloating, where my belly would rapidly distend after every meal, the swelling compounding with each thing I ate until the end of the day. The next morning, things would seemingly be back to normal, until I started to eat again. For a long time, I didn’t realise what was going on, believing that I was simply “fat” and that I had to do something about it. 

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Eating In My Thirties

(The things that matter when you think you’re past your prime.)

When I was twenty, a boy once said to me most spitefully that I should “wait until I’m thirty” to no longer be able to look the way I do, because age-related weight gain gets the better of everyone. It’s true that the passage of time has impressed itself on my body, but what’s wrong with the world when they see a self-assured woman? Apart from the creases and the cellulite that you’ll find even on the fittest human body, I’m coming to terms with my greying hair, sagging skin, and the nagging feeling of being past my prime. While I work on how I feel about these things, I hope that that boy, who must be ageing like fine wine, feels less threatened now.

I find it mildly amusing that people continue to comment on how “slim” I am, often reminding me of my rare privilege to “wear whatever I want”. It’s only when the lights are dimmed and the veil is off, I get to see what the world does not. I finally understand what people talk about when they talk about the perils of looking good–it doesn’t last forever. Meanwhile, the beauty and weight loss industries want you to believe that you can defy physics with reasonably priced over-the-counter products that you will need to purchase over and over again, only until they launch something newer and better.

The Moral Value of Foods

Somewhere near the age of thirty, in the aftermath of a prolonged episode of health anxiety, I altered my relationship with food. I resolved to eat only that which would directly accrue benefit to my body and promise to cause no harm, because in my intensely fearful state, every morsel of processed food that went into my body could potentially turn against it, leading to diseases I imagine so often, but can’t bring myself to name, and maybe that’s very much a part of the problem. I was experiencing something that can be best described as orthorexia.

orthorexia | ˌɔːθəˈrɛksɪə | 

noun [mass noun] 

an obsession with eating foods that one considers healthy. 

• (also orthorexia nervosa) a medical condition in which the sufferer systematically avoids specific foods that they believe to be harmful. 

This puritanical approach couldn’t and didn’t last very long, and I gradually desisted from attaching moral values to the foods I desired, although that’s all that popular discourse wants us to do. Even the most questionable preparations of food occupy prime real estate in retail stores, with misleading labels that assure us of their healthful benefits.

When I listened to my body carefully, I realised that I don’t particularly enjoy dessert other than ice-cream, and that too only because I like cold foods. That’s also why I think I love soda or “pop” or “cool drink” (whatever they call it in your region!). I thought I loved Coke, but it took me years to realise that it was its fizz that I liked most, and the temperature at which it is typically served. On a visit to Uzbekistan many years ago, I noticed that they only ever serve Coke at room temperature, and there’s nothing worse than drinking warm, flat Coke. Why was I ingesting heaps of sugar and other caramelised crap when all I ever wanted was a cold and fizzy drink? A dash of lemon and a spoonful of sugar blended into cold sparkling water is much nicer than the cloying cola. 

If you’ve ever struggled to resist temptation, consider exploring why you like (or dislike) a certain food. It could be because of the way it's served (temperature, presentation), or maybe you like its texture (I have a thing for tarts), or you may have an association with it, or simply because pop culture has you believe that you like it. For instance, my mother doesn’t like chocolate, but she goes to great lengths to avoid mentioning this, because every time someone learns of it, they invariably exclaim, “But who doesn’t like chocolate!”

It took me thirty years to conclude that I don’t love everything that’s bad, and I don’t hate everything that’s good, and that much of what’s labelled good and bad is entwined with its accessibility and desirability.

A note on the moral value of foods is incomplete without an appendix on vegetarianism. Being a vegetarian in India comes with a set of cultural connotations. It’s commonly perceived as virtuous, but not for the reasons that you think it is. Vegetarianism is closely linked with religious belief, its pursuit inevitably slots every practitioner into the categories of pious, devout, and, dare I say, pure. While I'm committed to my vegetarian lifestyle, I'm equally keen on extricating it from the virtues traditionally associated with it. There are specific ways in which I go about that, but perhaps that’s material for another piece.

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The Food Discourse: What we talk about when we talk about food

I grew up with the label of fussy eater. I would spend hours at the dining table, routinely chided for not eating fast enough. Slow eater was the cross I bore until I met my now-husband, who eats slower than I do. Only then did I realise what I was doing to those who deigned to dine with me!

But I really had to grow up to realise that what they call “fussy”, in my case, is a cry for consistency. I don’t seek much variety in the weekly menu. I’ll pick a one-bowl meal over a buffet of items, but Indian kitchens rarely allow for that kind of simplicity. As a culture, we substitute casual conversations with discussions about food, the list of ingredients and preparation processes outlining the contours of our day. Preparing three meals from scratch is customary in Indian homes. Perhaps I’m called fussy because I refuse to participate in the food-as-life discourse.  

With the exception of only two vegetables, I eat almost everything. Even as a child, I was never averse to whole foods. I thought I disliked home cooked food, until I realised that it was the elaborate preparations of Indian food that I didn’t like. 

Not partaking of the Indian diet is commonly conflated with eating poorly, as collectivist cultures are wont to do—by eating differently, you’re challenging what we’ve been doing for generations—who do you think you are, you individual? There’s little that’s worse than being recognised as an individual in your own right in a culture that’s so unforgivingly collectivist. And your food choices, just like your clothes and your customs, are not exempt from judgement. What you eat, how you eat, how much you eat, and when you eat—everything is under scrutiny and open to debate.

On the comfort of eating one’s ‘own’ food

I have yet to come across a person who doesn't have an easily recognisable, go-to comfort food. For most of my fellow Indians, it is some kind of Indian preparation. I recently chanced upon an interview with the namesake actor Richa Chaddha who claims that dal chawal is undisputedly every Indian’s comfort food. Every time she travels abroad for work, she can’t go more than a few days without an Indian meal. This isn’t peculiar to her—it’s the story of every Indian person I’ve ever known. Even on a two-day trip to a different country, you’ll find them foraging for dal chawal. Not only do I not care for dal chawal, I have been able to spend nearly six months in another country without ever wanting for Indian food. 

It’s not that I don’t have go-to foods, but I suspect that there is no language for unconventional food choices being someone’s comfort food. I tend to fall back on fairly simple preparations of wholesome foods. Crushed garlic and chilli are often the only flavours I seek. I’m happiest assembling a veggie wrap or blending some berries into a smoothie. I savour the simplicity of Mediterranean food, and I love certain recipes of Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese cuisine, all of which can be prepared with locally grown ingredients. Most of all, I love the eating experience, without wanting it to take over my life. 

A colleague once thought I was trying to sound fancy when I claimed to prefer tofu banh mi and udon noodles to poha and dal chawal. But I wasn’t pretending then, and I’m not pretending now. It’s possible to seek comfort in a food that isn’t traditionally your ‘own’, because what’s more mine than that which makes me feel at home?

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Feeling Well at Thirty-four

Turns out the nasty boy was right; at age thirty-four, I can’t get away with eating everything. The good thing, though, is that I don't want to get away with putting just about anything into my body. As women, we will tragically be more impelled by the way we look than even by the fear of illness and death. What does it mean to be alive, then, when we care more about how we look and less about how we feel? 

The recurrent spells of heart palpitations accompanied by dwindling stamina have got me exercising with some degree of consistency for the first time in my life. Most beginner workouts are still too much for me, but I assure myself that starting slow and small will always be better than not having started at all. A few weeks ago, I was taking a walk at midnight, because that’s when I least expect to encounter fellow humans. Unfortunately, a field rat type of critter thought the same. The critter and I, both mortally afraid of the other, nearly collided into one another. Gripped with fear, I turned around and darted across the block until I was sure I was a safe distance away, while the critter must have been speeding in its own direction. When I stopped running, I realised I wasn’t out of breath. And that was the best feeling in the world–to have lost time but to have regained strength. Thank you, Critter.

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Eating Well in 2023

In the age of the cloud kitchen and doorstep delivery (and disposable income and digital payments), eating well is harder than ever. In some ways, it was easier in the 90s, because there were a series of obstacles to overcome every time you wanted to order in, especially for someone like me who dreads talking on the phone. Every time I desired something fun to eat, I would have to muster the courage to talk to a stranger on the phone, who attempted to speak English, but wasn’t adequately fluent in any language to be able to communicate clearly, and would, therefore, fail to comprehend my order the first three times I tried to explain it with excruciating enunciations. And god forbid I’d ever want anything customised! Then I had to borrow some cash from my mother, which meant that I had to let her know I had ordered some food, and that was invariably perceived as a rejection of home-cooked food. Worse still, the cash wasn’t always easily accessible. You also needed the exact amount, because that’s another cultural peculiarity—we seem to hate returning change. And then you’d have to hope that your food comes through exactly as you expect it to, and that when the doorbell rings, everyone at home isn’t alerted to your transgressive indulgence. 

It’s perfectly seamless and discreet now—there are no phone calls. If you’re lucky, there’s no human interaction at all. If you’re luckier still, they’ll heed the sign on your door that requests them never to press the bell.

I’m not great at curbing the impulses, but here a few things that help. Creating a meal plan with nutrient diversity even if there’s culinary homogeneity, enabling easy access to whole foods, restricting access to junk food by not stocking it at home, consistent exercise and quality sleep (still working on those two), demystifying what it is about a particular food that makes it so alluring (it’s often things like texture and temperature), identifying the settings and times of day when particular cravings arise, and engaging with what that tells me about myself—am I bored, am I lonely, am I substituting food for something else that I may need? 

Like every other relationship in my life, the one I have with food is also a work in progress. I must also quickly mention that my relationship with food has been directly impacted by my relationship with my mother, who has of course been my primary caregiver, but is also a clinical nutritionist and a prolific author whose work I have closely been associated with in the capacity of a copyeditor. It’s also interesting to examine my evolving relationship with food since the time I took charge of my own kitchen, gradually acquainting myself with the invisible labour that women have performed in the realm of daily food choices in the cramped corners of their kitchen, not for themselves, but for the insatiable desires of their family. This, too, is material for another piece.

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Let me conclude with an illustrative instance of irony. While I may not be a fan of Indian cuisine, rajma chawal happens to be one of its few offerings that I enjoy. I have many reasons to dislike rajma chawal, yet it holds a special place in my heart, a profound testament to my ever-evolving relationship with food.

Like most people I know, I am plagued with recurrent dreams of being back in school, inescapably faced yet again with its trials and tribulations. I awake from these dreams, bathed in relief that I will never have to go to school again. Decades have passed, and I have—at least in my waking life—come a long way since, seeking comfort in the familiar taste of home-cooked rajma chawal, reminding myself that I can reclaim my memories, one bite at a time.