During every phone call with my dad — the biggest extrovert I know, an endless provider to his core, yet a man of few words on the phone, satiated simply by hearing my voice on the other side of the call — he will always advise me to do one thing, other than stay warm from Binghamton’s winter: “Eat well.”
Every time I hear these words, my heart aches for home. Through my family, food has always been the center of my childhood and now adulthood. And I’m sure many children of immigrants can relate, because we are all cut from the same cloth, all learning to love, apologize and survive through what is put on the table.
In many families, food is a silent language. It is how care is expressed when words feel too vulnerable. Love arrives quietly, in the form of a peeled orange left on your desk while studying or a bowl of cut watermelon slid toward you on a hot summer day without comment. In my home, apologies were never spoken aloud. Instead, they were carried through fruit — carefully sliced apples arranged in a small bowl with yogurt, grapes meticulously peeled and oranges segmented with the seeds removed.
These gestures were never framed as emotional repair, yet we, as their children, always understood what they meant. Eating the fruit was to accept the apology and move on as if nothing had ever happened. To leave it untouched was never something you dared to consider.
Using food as a form of communication is a tradition passed down through generations. Many of our parents grew up in environments where verbal affection was rare, vulnerability was unheard of and survival and familial responsibility took precedence over emotional expression. Feeding someone became the safest way to show care.
Moving to an entirely different culture where verbal and physical expression were valued, there was a learning curve between our parents’ childhoods and the ones they chose to build for us. To participate in western culture was to love loudly, and the noise was embedded in fragrant spices and home-cooked meals fed to you by hand.
But this love, while sincere, is nowhere near uncomplicated. Each piece of fruit sends its own message.
“You eat because I love you.”
“You eat because I worry.”
“You eat because I don’t know how to say I’m sorry.”
“You eat and forget about what I did.”
“You eat because you think it will solve everything.”
“You eat your feelings.”
The kitchen, the very site where love is created and served, is also where I’ve watched a lifetime of misogyny take place. In many households, the kitchen is women’s territory, not an area that was claimed, but expected. To hush my younger and frustrated brother when he asked why my mother alone had to carry this burden, while his job was to sit down and eat with the other men instead of helping my mother alongside me, I answered that his participation was optional, whereas mine was mandated.
Mothers, grandmothers and daughters who once were at the dinner table slowly became tethered to the stove. Becoming a woman meant hearing criticism of their cooking from guests, being made to serve drinks and washing empty plates. This labor of cooking is rarely named as labor at all. It is simply what women are made to do.
Meanwhile, the men in my family could opt in or out of the kitchen without consequence. Their relationship to food was consumption. To make sure my mother’s cooking was praised by the end of the night and to wash the dishes while she finally began eating at the table was to love her.
Growing up, I learned that my mother’s presence in the kitchen was assumed. A quiet, loving and tough woman — someone gentle whose toes you would also never dare step on. She cooked after long work days, cooked when she was sick, cooked when she was angry and cooked when her back was nearly about to give out on her. Her exhaustion was invisible because there was always freshly made daal and rice on the table for us to eat for dinner.
As daughters, we absorb these experiences. We are taught to cherish our mothers’ cooking, to recognize it as love, while also inheriting the expectation that one day, we will replicate it. We watch our mothers give endlessly and subconsciously learn that womanhood is measured by sacrifice. The kitchen becomes both an inheritance and a burden.
Even the way food is portioned reveals embedded hierarchies. In many of our households, elders and men are served first and served more, while women quietly take smaller portions or eat last. My mother often floated through the dining room, constantly asking if everyone had enough, before sitting down with whatever remained. This self erasure was framed as care, as sacrifice, as what good mothers and good women do.
At the dinner table, food becomes a setting where love and control coexist. You are fed lovingly and generously, but you are also deeply monitored. Comments about your weight, appetite and appearance are made out of concern, often by “family” you barely even know. “You eat so much, but you look like you are made out of bones!” or “Eat less, your face is getting swollen, are you even controlling yourself at college?”
These comments land heavier because they come from your own blood and most importantly, the same hands that cook your favorite meals. Love and shame soon begin to share the same plate.
And still, despite all of this, food remains deeply tender. Food is one of our few cultural anchors that survives assimilation and displacement. Although flavors, ingredients and brands adapt and vary by geographic availability, cooking remains a way to preserve identity. For immigrant parents, feeding their children traditional food is an act of keeping the culture alive.
I cannot deny the comfort of dishes that taste like childhood, the way certain spices in my cabinet can bring me right back to my kitchen in Queens, New York. Even as I critique the systems that shaped my upbringing, I miss the whistle of the pressure cooker, the clatter of dishes, the quiet offering of fruit as a sign of peace.
Now, living on my own, with texts from my father about how hard it is for him to eat certain meals without me at the table, I find myself trying to recreate those meals. I call for recipes that were never measured, instructions that were never articulated.
“A little bit more of the timur pepper.”
“Does it smell like mine?”
“Not too much, or you’ll burn your mouth off.”
“Until it looks nice and colorful.”
“Looks delicious, you did such a good job, my shona.”
I am still trying to perfect my mom’s craft on my own, with each attempt an act of honoring the love embedded in every one of my meals and with each bite making me wish I could give her a bowl of cut fruit.
Aislinn Shrestha is a junior majoring in integrative neuroscience.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.