Love in Spoonfuls

At Harvard, food is a love language that I can’t express but can only feel.

It’s not that I can’t cook. After all, I have enough supplies in my dorm room to last me forever if I need to. But limited time and little necessity to devote time to myself leave me crawling to the dining hall only when it’s convenient.

The strongest women I knew used food as a way to survive and a way to socialize. While this role was forced upon them, their cooking was done with love and care. I don’t have that skill, which sometimes makes me question whether I could survive on my own.

My inability to cook only intensifies the discomfort surrounding my body and my eating habits. I remember feeling uncomfortable with the shape and look of my body. Noting this feeling only cues others to tell me how untrue these anxieties are. Regardless of what other people think or know, their assurances don’t help address my problems.

Instead, it’s up to me to settle the discomfort through care. Caring for myself at Harvard is more difficult than I like to admit. I question how I can stem from generations of nourishing women as someone who can barely replenish myself.

***

I’ve always known that my body was a little bigger. Growing up as a dancer, it was easy to notice when my body shape seemed to fill the stage more than others. When I was younger, I noticed how people would take one look at my mom and use her as a justification for why I looked like I did, making assumptions about both of us in the process.

The assumptions begin with smirks on the airplane as my mom asks for a seat belt extender and continue with the stares she attracts as she walks down the aisle. It upsets me to know that people judge her when she talks about food and her love for making it, simply because of her weight. Hoisting plates, random kitchen appliances, and massive boxes from different stores to the temple, she still does whatever she can to help others out.

Yet despite my family’s effortless compassion, when I lost seven pounds after last semester, some of my relatives took it as a cause for celebration. After all, losing weight is a good thing, right?

Is it? Is it really acceptable when I’ve worked myself to the bone, ignoring meals for work? Is it a good thing? My mind remains flustered at these comments. To ignore eating for work, your body needs to wake up at a level of exhaustion and anxiety that allows you to eat away at yourself while avoiding food. My moods are unstable; I clash with people I normally wouldn't. I’m not trying to restrict myself, but the world convinces me to wait.

Is it healthier to not eat three meals most days than it is to love food and eat as normal?

***

Whenever I return home, I am thrown back into a familiar world. My mom gently asks me what I would like for dinner. She puts together rice, rasam, and yogurt, and I find myself comforted by the taste — not one of homesickness, but of compassion and warmth. The sudden change evokes something in me that leaves me in tears.

Being at home over the winter healed my eating habits. I went back to the standard of eating three meals a day. I went back to eating normally. After all, rejecting what my mom makes almost feels like I am saying no to her love.

My mom has almost every kitchen appliance that exists. It’s not solely an obsession — it’s also preparation, as my mom is always left to make large batches of food for events. For someone else’s dinner party, she’s making the food.

And that’s something she learned from her mom. My grandma would spend her mornings asking people about what foods they like, telling them what she wanted to cook later that day. Even now, despite getting older, she pushes herself to make the things she knows people will love, spreading warmth through the flavor of her food.

So when people ask me why I prepare food for the communities I care about like when I make prasadam for Harvard Dharma or leave food in the Mather dining hall, I wish I could say:

It’s not that I need to push myself to scrape whatever pots and pans I have in a house kitchen to cook. It’s not that I necessarily enjoy that either. It’s that it was a love language taught to me by those I love — one that I want to share.

— Magazine writer Neeraja S. Kumar can be reached at neeraja.kumar@thecrimson.com.