How my relationship with food changed (again!)
July 15, 2025
I've had like two food-related epiphanies in the past two years, which I can't help but feel like is way too many for such a short time.
My first was upon finishing the series Dungeon Meshi. Through its 90-something chapters, it tells a tale of friends and food, and walks away to say the same thing it said at the very start: "Eating is the privilege of the living."
A simple sentiment, but a pure and honest one. To be able to eat something, to be able to relish in it, to be able to enjoy it, and to be able to sustain yourself; it's a privilege that's easy to take for granted. And with that, I was suddenly more passively conscious of and appreciative of what entered my mouth, as silly as that sounds. The texture, the taste, the fulfillment I got from eating these things; it all just meant more.Honestly, my eating habits didn't really get much better, but the shift in mentality was tangible. When I ate it became less about simply needing to satiate myself. I thought about the process of eating more for the experience it was.
Then, perhaps rather ironically for someone who had since finished reading a lovely little series about people who kill and eat sentient beings for munchies, I became vegan. I quickly learned a few things: 1. Forget local joints, most major food chains don't have "options" for you, at least over here in the west (Taco Bell, Saladworks and Chipotle are probably the big ones), and 2. Plant-based equivalents to the kind of stuff you might keep in your fridge like cheese, chicken nuggets and hotdogs tends to run you more. Things like "deli meat" and "cheese" become that much more of a luxury than they were before.
And so with those things in mind, I found if I wanted to eat consistently in a way that satisfied me and not spend way more money than I did before, I had to at least do some form of cooking or meal prep. More than ever, microwavable meals and constant takeout/fast food orders weren't going to cut it. More than I ever had before in my life, I made food. Sometimes it was as simple as some rice, veggies and sauce. Sometimes it was frying black bean burgers I made from scratch, or trying a marinade. And that was when my relationship with food enters its next form.
You may have heard or seen people say this in defense, but tofu and soy protein in general are a truly excellent canvas. The bad thing about a block of tofu is that it almost tastes like nothing. The good thing about a block of tofu is that you can almost make it taste like anything. From trying and trying to make tofu dinners that I'd really enjoy and doing my own research, I learned how to do basically everything with those fucked up little blocks of bean. Freezing and unfreezing it gives it a spongier, more meatlike-texture. A little kala namak and nutritional yeast among other things and you can make a very satisfying egg-like breakfast scramble. Tamari, liquid smoke and a few other seasonings applied to textured vegetable protein and fried can make for a delightfully umami-filled "taco meat", or maybe even substitute bacon bits if you bake them and sub certain ingredients instead. One of my go-tos is blending some silken tofu with nutritional yeast and a few other ingredients to make a pretty solid non-dairy queso for nachos. It's through all these little manipulations that I came to appreciate not just the act of enjoying food, but the act of making food. I don't think I'd ever gotten so much use out of my spice cabinet before. Oops.
Ayesha from the Atelier series, who is an alchemist, not a cook, but I like to pretend I'm doing alchemy when I cook and I needed an image to make this feel less textwall-y so here you go
If I thought eating was satisfying before, then there was just no preparing me for this. This certainly isn't some kind of magical side effect of my change in lifestyle, of course — no doubt plenty of people had this epiphany before. But I suppose it's the fact that I was forced out of my comfort zone that I looked to creating my own pleasure and making what I thought would fulfill me; and that, by extension, gave me an even greater appreciation than ever before. The way ingredients meld together to invoke new tastes and textures... it's an art and a science and one I've loved learning. Ironically, I feel like I'm spending more money than I was before, just because I keep spotting new recipes and having new ideas and going "I have to try this" and gathering the ingredients. When things turn out well, I smile with a fork in my mouth and a feeling of a job well done. When I inject a little creativity of my own, that feeling goes double. Being in the kitchen has become a ritual for me in such a way that I can't help but get a little bent out of shape when it's interrupted (which happens often— the place we moved to has a much smaller kitchen and my dad will go in and out of it at least three times in an hour).
Another big thing is my palate expanded and I developed a taste for things I was stubborn about before, in part because I was forced to look at them and appreciate they added to dishes. I used to resent mushrooms and find them needless, but now I love having them on pizza. Never been big on beans, either— that changed! I feel like in the process of making sure I had things I could enjoy, I ended up really refining my own tastes. The ritual of cooking made instant gratification all the better, too— an occasional Friday night is rewarding myself with some takeout or a tub of ice cream.
It's almost a bit silly for me to lay things out like this, but it really can be easy to take all the little things you experience for granted. You don't necessarily have to struggle with depression to discount something like that— eating is a routine that you begin the moment you're born, so it's not like the average person is considering every little detail about it, right? I want to say rare positive occurrences are always easier to consider fondly than common ones; I find if I focus more on the specific feelings I get out of a meal at a specific point, I realize even a regular peanut butter & jam sandwich is a wonderful thing.
Life is a bunch of little overlapping occurrences that may add up to feeling common and forgettable, but that certainly doesn't make them any valuable. Even if you don't look back on the sunset you saw 5 years ago, or that sandwich you ate 3 months ago, you can still, in the moment, appreciate and love what these things bring to your world. I grapple with anxiety and depressive tendencies like many others, but I try my hardest to hold tightly onto the mundane goods; for the longest time eating was in the back of my head, something to just "do", and my poor diet and habits reflected that. Now it's a fundamental part of the human experience that I can craft for myself, one that has as many possibilities as there are stars in the sky, and I am often reminded that nothing has me quite like a good meal.