My journey of understanding taste won’t be complete without these two incidents. It was a couple of years after my wedding. My wife and I had just returned from the UK. Post that, my wife fell sick for a month. Then my mother-in-law wasn’t keeping well. I was in Bangalore for my work, and my wife was in Chennai with her parents. I knew my mother-in-law wasn’t keeping well. My mother-in-law had asked my wife to ask me what I would like to eat. I was way too obnoxious to respond appropriately to that. I told her that I can eat anything. I sat down for lunch along with the rest of the family. There were more items on the menu than a typical wedding reception. I had a plate served with most of it. My mother-in-law had made brinjal curry. Brinjal curry is something I love but none of them like it. My wife won’t even touch it. She had made it just for me and the others had a portion of it. For a person who didn’t bother saying what he wanted, this was a surprise. I couldn’t express. It was brinjal. It was one of my favourites but it tasted very different. When my mother-in-law softly asked me how it tasted, I had to tell her it was absolutely amazing. She had taken the pain to make this for me with so much care. The taste and texture of that curry that I felt wasn’t the same that the rest did. What happened in me there?
Most people from India wouldn’t have experienced the love and affection that I did from an elderly Pakistani family. I was living in Reading, England, as a house guest with an elderly Pakistani family. The uncle was blind, and the aunt took care of him. I had a couple of other friends who stayed in the same place with me. One day, my friends asked me for help with an event they are organising for their company. Since 8 am in the morning, I was busy moving around, purchasing stuff, helping set up the place, organising, etc. I came home a few times to pick up items. The event started at 6 pm, and since it was their company event, I came back home. I was surprised to see the aunt there. They finish their work and go to bed by 5:30 pm. She told me in a soft voice, “Son, I have seen you extremely busy all day. I don’t think you had breakfast or lunch. I was waiting for you to come home.” I told her that it was fine. I was shocked she noticed I hadn’t had any meal. She said, “No, please sit down. I have made dough for you.” Saying that, she made four rotis with potato and okra gravy. She told me I have to finish it and then left to her room. I didn’t know what to say. Every bite of that was care, affection, love that I couldn’t taste the food itself. The ingredients almost didn’t matter to me. What was I tasting here?
It wasn’t just brinjal curry in a Chennai summer. It wasn’t just rotis on a quiet evening in Reading. It was care. Wrapped in silence. It was effort noticed too late, but never forgotten.
When my mother-in-law asked what I wanted to eat, I gave her an answer void of specificity. “Anything.” But what she heard was not the words. It was the gap behind them. And somehow, she knew. She made brinjal curry—a dish she didn’t even like, a dish no one else touched, but one that she knew I loved. I didn’t ask. And yet she gave.
The moment I took the first bite, it tasted different. Not different in seasoning. Different in depth. Because taste is not just detected by the tongue, it is decoded by the brain. The brinjal activated my taste buds, yes—but the act behind it, the unseen effort, the subtle noticing, lit up emotional circuits in my brain. The amygdala registered gratitude, the hypothalamus felt safe, and the dopamine pathways rewarded the warmth of being cared for.
It wasn’t just food. It was a reminder that someone had thought about me—even when I didn’t think to speak up for myself. And then, there was that evening in Reading.
An elderly woman, with tired eyes and a quiet presence, had watched me rush in and out all day. I hadn’t said a word about being hungry. I hadn’t expected anyone to notice. But she had. She saw what I couldn’t say, and responded not with words, but with something more ancient: nurture through food.
When she said, “I’ve made dough for you,” what she meant was, “I saw you.” And when I sat down to eat those warm rotis with potato and okra, I didn’t taste the ingredients I tasted attunement. I tasted a kind of maternal attention that is so rare and so pure, it bypasses the mouth entirely and goes straight to the soul.
In both moments, the neurobiology of taste was hijacked by the biology of emotion. These meals didn’t just travel from mouth to stomach they travelled through limbic pathways, releasing oxytocin with every bite, quieting the nervous system, slowing the heart rate, calming the mind.
Science calls it contextual modulation of taste where emotional context amplifies or alters taste perception. But I call it something simpler. I was tasting care made tangible. Effort made edible. Affection cooked into form. That’s why I couldn’t taste the food itself. Because the feeling was stronger than the flavour.
What began as a journey of taste, ends as a journey of connection. Across memories, across distances, across acts both spoken and silent. I’ve come to see that food is never just food.
It is how we give, how we notice and how we remember. It is how we say: you matter to me without ever needing to say a word.
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