When I moved from India to university, one of the things that made me most homesick was the food.
I expected to miss my family, my friends, and the general familiarity of home. What I did not expect was how much I would miss opening the kitchen door and immediately knowing what was cooking, or sitting down to a meal that I had not had to plan or shop for myself.
Suddenly, the foods I had barely thought twice about at home became the things I craved most. A bowl of spicy dal and rice, or even a cup of chai made the way I was used to could make an ordinary day feel noticeably better. It was not necessarily because these were my favourite foods. It was because they tasted familiar. And, living away from home has made me realise that comfort food is often less about the food itself and more about everything we associate with it.
Food can hold memories
Certain foods can carry memories inside them. You can taste something you have eaten hundreds of times before and suddenly remember a family dinner or the sound of people chatting around the table. For me, a lot of the food I associate with home was simply part of everyday life. I previously never considered it comforting because I never had to miss it.
It was only after moving away that those very ordinary meals started to feel significant. At university, so much of your life is unfamiliar at first. Your room is different, your routine changes, you are constantly meeting people and even something as simple as doing your weekly food shop requires thought and budgeting.
Familiar food, then, becomes an outlet that can immediately transport you back to something you know.
Recreating home is part of the comfort
There is something humbling about trying to recreate the meals you grew up eating, especially for an infamously bad cook like me. A dish that seemed incredibly simple when my parents made it now involves several texts and phone calls home, and the realisation that “just add a little” is not actually a useful measurement.
My attempts do not always taste exactly right. Sometimes they are too spicy. Sometimes they are too bland. Sometimes I realise halfway through cooking that I do not have the right ingredients in the fridge. But that does not matter.
There is something comforting about the process itself: buying familiar ingredients, cooking something I recognise to fill a completely different kitchen with smells that remind me of home. Even if the final result is not perfect, for a little while the distance between university and home feels smaller.
Comfort food is a form of care
Food is one of the easiest ways we take care of people. When someone is having a bad day, we offer them dessert. When someone is ill, we make them something warm. When friends and family come over, we feed them. We rarely describe these things as emotional support, but in many ways that is exactly what they are.
At university, I think this becomes even more noticeable because everyone is learning how to look after themselves. Sometimes making yourself a proper meal after a long day is a form of care. Sometimes it is your flatmate offering you some of what they have cooked. Sometimes it is introducing a friend to something you grew up eating and watching them try it for the first time.
Food has a way of creating familiarity between people as well as places.
Some of my favourite university memories have come from sitting around a kitchen table eating something someone has made, sharing dishes and talking for far longer than we intended to. Maybe that is another reason food feels so closely connected to home: home has never really been just a location. It is also the feeling of being looked after and surrounded by people.
Making a new place feel like yours
Eventually, something interesting happens when you live away from home long enough.
You start building new comfort foods too.
There are meals you begin making regularly, cafés you automatically suggest, and snacks that somehow become part of your weekly routine. Foods that once felt unfamiliar slowly become connected to new friends and new memories. When I went home this summer, I was surprised by the things I found myself missing: Taste’s Dirty Chai, the cookies my friend always bakes, and even the quick-fix dinners my flatmate and I throw together on particularly busy days.
That does not replace the food you grew up with. Instead, it adds another layer.
For me, comfort food now sits somewhere between two versions of home: the one I grew up with in India and the life I am building at university.
Perhaps that is why comfort food deserves more credit
It is easy to dismiss it as simply craving something familiar, but I think it does something much bigger. Food can carry memory, routine and a sense of belonging in a way few other things can.
And when you are living somewhere new, sometimes a familiar meal is enough to remind you that home does not always have to feel quite so far away.