Everyone needs it, everyday. Most people like it. People like making it. Obtaining it is a big part of your life.

You need it for energy, you need it out of habit. You need it for growth. You need it for taste. What? How much? When? Where? With whom? Everyone has an opinion. And everyone must partake. Because not playing is not an option, not choosing also becomes a choice.

A digression. A particularly swashbuckling undergrad narrating his own exploits. “What kind of music do you listen to?” he says “Sorry bud, I don’t listen to music”. A perfect foil to all of us conversation starters.

Everyone must eat, work, handle money, and find a partner, and most likely do these things well. When I was young, I had few interests in common with my football-watching, pop-culture-obsessed classmates. I couldn’t relate, and interesting conversations were rare. I become an adult, and BAM! Now suddenly you, too, MUST take an interest in the things that are important to me, and we have something real to talk about. “Sorry bud, I don’t eat anything”?- I don’t think so, no.

“Food brings us together”. Indeed. I’d like to abstract this- anything that is a fundamental part of being human, brings us together (as humans). Seems trite when I dissect it that way.

I started off with a supply of ample, healthy, tasty, regular food on the table, courtesy of my mother. Food was sometimes an unwanted necessity, a chore stopping me from my current object of attention, something to be consumed while reading the newspaper. Sometimes, I coveted it, anticipated it, and enjoyed it. Things that I’d actually eaten- slices of watermelon in the summer, “amul butter” bread, fried food, the rush of sugar- which I still remember fondly today. Things that I imagined would be glorious- burgers at McD, Lays, those 5-star chocolates- sought out of peer-pressure, marketing, deprivation, or an illicit thrill, a pathetic thirst that I still feel ashamed of, when I really try to remember how I felt then. Then eventually, things that I appreciated- the Idli-Sambar my mom made on Sundays (still the best in the world), Aaji’s innovative clean-out-the-fridge thalipeeths which could incorporate all ingredients, ambadichi bhaji, all the rice-flour preparations which kalyanchi-aaji made. My participation in the making of food was limited to tasting half-ready preparations, and figuring out what was missing. My sense of taste developed mostly out of my mom’s false attributions of knowledge and ability. If Aai is saying it, maybe I do know exactly when salt is missing? So I began to believe.

Living at home all my life, I never came in touch with hostel food (or a “meal plan”, for the US-educated). Because exposure was limited, what was a drag to hosteilites was novelty to me. It was, still, food readily available- paid for, not too expensive, reasonably tasty. No effort involved. The flour-y rotis, spicy sabzis with generous amounts of oil, well-meaning balanced-nutrition computations that delivered a healthy diet- I liked those days. Day scholars have it easy.

What about true hosteilites? There’s a dependable source of food, you don’t go hungry. Over time, you develop preferences- “I like this bhaji from Thursday eveneings, but not that one on Tuesday afternoon”. “I do lunch in the canteen, and sometimes skip it, and do dinners in the hostel.” “Sunday feasts are overpriced- I’m going to Hindawi!” “XYZ used to order pizza every weekend, he had stacks of hundreds of boxes in his room”. The endless drone of mess food becomes unbearable, and hosteilites fall into a shifting pattern of multi-sourcing their sustenance, converging on some strange attractors.

Having someone that loves you cook for you is a blessing. Being able to afford a private cook is a privilege. A regular supply of mass-produced, reasonably healthy food is a panacea. Now we come to the harsh reality. You don’t have either one of these options.

For students living on their own, food is an optimization problem. You try to minimize time, money, and labor, while trying to maximize (to various degrees) satiety, health, and taste. This engenders interesting phenomena- the 1-footlong-a-day savant, the 30-minute-fridge-to-plate machine, the one-carb-dish malnourished leper, the boiled-vegetables psychopath, the “cooking-is-meditation” cheat-code, the meal-prepper. And then there’s me- the mad one-dish-wonder, who lives on a combination of bulk-cooked meals that would have been very healthy had they been fresh, and on $contents_of_refrigerator when all fails. I’ve gone from cooking rotis from scratch, and dividing cooking duties, to a madcap usal-egg-salad-soggy-sandwich-table-scraps diet at my lowest point, and back again to a worked-out schedule with my roommates that exposed me to new cuisines that I still treasure.

When the same students graduate, the abundance of time, money, and people leads to healthy competition and variety in the marketplace of food choices. I’ve seen a wide variety in “hunting and gathering”-

  • A complete dependence on your workplace, with work schedules adjusted to subsume free dinner in the office. Weekends are for ordering online.

  • Mealprep, but with a variety of meals cooked on the weekend, mix-and-match.

  • Home cooking that devolves into starvation (or eating scraps). Then you become aware of your bank balance, and order food at will. You don’t go hungry.

  • Skipping dinner, because now you are Health Conscious(TM). Bonus points if you “just drink a protein shake”.

  • Spontaneous elaborate meals. One-pot meals.

  • A daily cooking routine, cooking prioritized, unperturbed by other conditions.

  • Those “meal subscriptions”, for you hustlers.

  • Restaurants as sustenance, unapologetic. You’ve ranged across your city, and have your go-to places marked. “Dinner” is a drive out or an order in.

  • Diets. Often seasonal, shifting.

Things will change, of course, when you are married. (or as they say these days, “living with your partner”). For a long time, men have had it easy. I would be very curious how a similar essay will turn out, written by a woman who still cooks for her family everyday. I’m very interested in what people from my generation end up doing. For one, shared responsibility and divided labour might spark creativity, and variety. It also might lead to disagreement, and hopefully, an equilibrium.

I’ll be keeping myself from starving, putting love into food, controlling what I eat because health(TM) is important to me, balancing my crusade of culture preservation with my love of novelty, ~giving in to~ enjoying dining out, and making up arbitrary “food rules”, all at the same time. It’s going to be an exciting time.