I have a confession. I spent the better part of this academic year genuinely convinced I just didn’t like food that much. Like, as a personality trait. I thought I had evolved beyond the petty pleasures of a good meal. I was disattached from the constant need to satisfy my tongue. Disciplined. Probably built different.
And then I came home.
The moment my mother put a plate of dal chawal in front of me, regular, Tuesday dal chawal, nothing special, she makes it every week, I had what I can only describe as a spiritual experience. I ate so fast I forgot to breathe. I came up for air looking slightly deranged. My tastebuds, dormant for eight months, had apparently been lying in state waiting for this exact moment to resurrect.
Here’s the thing about mess food: it’s not even bad, exactly. It’s just… beige. Nutritionally complete, texturally beige, emotionally neutral. You eat it the same way you scroll through your phone, mechanically, without presence, wondering vaguely if this is all there is.
After a few months of this, you stop expecting food to actually taste like anything. You eat to survive. You treat lunch as a chore you have to get through before your 2 PM class. You start looking at people who care about food as somewhat naive. “Oh, you LIKE eating? How charming. How unsophisticated of you.”
And then you come home and your tastebuds stage a full coup.
For me it happened in waves. First the home food revelation (see: dal chawal incident, described above). Then the realization that chai has flavour, actual flavour, and the thing they served us in the mess was merely hot and brown. Then I had a mango. I stood in my kitchen eating a mango like I was in a film about someone who has never seen a mango. My family watched with a mix of concern and secondhand satisfaction.
The most embarrassing part? I’ve started complimenting food. Out loud. Unprompted. “This is really good,” I keep saying, like a food critic who got their taste-testing ability back after a freak accident. My mother looks mildly smug every time, which she has earned.
I think what actually happened is that mess food didn’t just bore my palate β it lowered my baseline so completely that everything now tastes disproportionately incredible. A chakna at Narsis on the way back from class? Transcendent. Maggi I made myself at 1 AM during exams? A masterpiece. My friend’s leftover parle-g dunked in milk powder chai? I would die for it.
This is the real college experience. Not the friendships, not the growth, not the career readiness. It’s that you will return home a changed person β someone who tears up slightly at a good sabzi and has completely lost the ability to be casual about ghar ka khana.
I leave you with this: if you’re still in the thick of the semester, eating your third plate of dal that tastes exactly like the second plate that tasted exactly like the first β hold on. Summer is coming. Your tastebuds will rise again.
They always do.