Bittersweet: Five Voices on Food and Queerness

What does food have to do with queerness? Oishika Roy gathers perspectives on eating, desire, chosen families, and the delicate intersection of food and love.

At home, I eat in small bowls in half-spoon measures. It has often seemed to me that the easiest way to access the femininity I aspired towards was through this smallness. This desire to be small isn’t uncommon when it comes to navigating and asserting ‘womanhood’.

In asking Riddhi Dastidar—a writer based in Delhi—if how they experience gender impacts how they eat, I recounted moments of covering my mouth while chewing in public, and on dates with men I am attracted to. Inevitably, our bodies, our gender, our desires and how we experience them are tied to how we eat, and what we eat. So, it was a bit absurd to me when upon explaining the idea for this piece, distant friends and particularly family seemed confused: what does food have to do with queerness?

However, listening to Nidhi Mariam Jacob, Riddhi Dastidar, Ruchi Sawardekar, Ashish Sharma, and Mabel Mirza talk about eating, not eating, cooking, not cooking, and growing as queer people revealed how fundamental food is to us. We eat when it is a joy, and when it is a tyranny. We eat together and alone. In thinking about food with mundanity—what to make for dinner, how many bites are too many—we neglect to acknowledge how diverse, layered, and nuanced our relationships with food can be.

Nidhi told us how she rediscovered her appetite with her partner Bhavana, while Riddhi shared that their love for eating seems more intrinsic than their want for sex. Mabel’s affinity for food is realised in eating with his chosen family, while for Ashish, making an unconventional bowl of pasta was the first step towards feeling pride. Ruchi shows us that food is a way to imagine love outside frameworks of romance and traditional families that we’re all too familiar with. Through the perspectives included in this mini-anthology, we are reminded that how we interact with food is more different than and just as similar as we imagine.

To love someone is to let them see you eat

Nidhi Mariam Jacob

“I looove idlis,” says Nidhi. “I can eat them at any time, anywhere.” In her view, idlis are perfect for all occasions, whether it’s Sunday lunch at Uncle Tom’s after church, or as a snack with a bit of chutney podi and ghee, or even after a night out of heavy drinking. Absorbent and fluffy, they’re gentle on our bodies.

At 46, Nidhi—an independent artist in Bangalore—knows exactly what she wants to eat, and when; her body tells her what flavours and textures it craves. Her partner Bhavana admires this about her.

But it hasn’t always been like this. Despite relishing food while growing up, Nidhi lost interest in eating in her twenties. “I just ate because I was hungry and for sustenance, I didn’t really care,” she says. “And the funny thing is, I couldn’t eat when I went out or in front of others. I just couldn’t do it. I’d always have to come home and eat.”

For the first two years of their relationship, Nidhi and Bhavana didn’t really eat together. Until one winter day in 2017, when they ate meaty burgers in Bhavana’s one-room flat, with lots of fries. “Suddenly, food became such a huge thing for us, and I started eating like there’s no tomorrow. I was going crazy with food. Something happened to my life (after Bhavana entered it),” she says.

Today, Nidhi can intuitively read Bhavana’s feelings based on what she wants to eat, just like she can for herself. And when she finds herself desiring certain fruits, she knows she is in the mood for sex.

Suddenly, food became such a huge thing for us, and I started eating like there’s no tomorrow. I was going crazy with food. Something happened to my life (after Bhavana entered it).

During the Covid-19 lockdown, the two of them acted in a play (on Zoom)—directed by Anuja Ghosalkar—which explored erotica. In preparing to say lines on licking chocolate off of each other, they discovered that they were eating with more intention, and paying attention to what the other eats. To witness your love eating is to know their body at their most vulnerable.

Now, when Nidhi expresses hunger, a plate appears in front of her, with an assortment of colours and textures. “You should eat, you didn’t do it properly for all these years, now you must eat,” Nidhi recounts Bhavana’s words. Through eating together, and meals of sambar rice and chicken wings that accommodate both of their cravings, they continue to see, know, and desire each other.

‘I am coming home. Make me something.’

Riddhi Dastidar

In their writing, Riddhi evokes feeling with taste. Descriptions of abstract things—heartbreak, love, emptiness—take on a tactile quality; time curdles. Ideas become things you can slice, spread, devour, spit. It makes sense because taste comes from within us—we feel it in our gut, teeth, tongue. The act of eating is written into our bodies.

“An appetite for food, novelty, and the world—to me, they’re all very related,” says Riddhi Dastidar, an independent writer and reporter living in Delhi. The desire to eat a lot, and lick clean the bones of a new place is insatiable. As someone on the ace spectrum, “the desire for food feels more inherent than the desire for sex does.” The gnawing, clenching pull of hunger; the dizziness of nausea from having eaten too much, being unable to eat at all; the unthinking, instinctive calling up of a friend to tell them, “I am coming home. Make me something.” It is built in us to love food, and to love through it.

“the desire for food feels more inherent than the desire for sex does.”

Riddhi doesn’t cook. “The funny thing is, for someone who loves food so much, I toh don’t cook.” It’s not that they’ve never cooked. Living alone in a country away from home, and trying out the ‘cooking is relaxing’ rhetoric, they found themselves making noodle soups, rice-based chicken dishes, and warm meals that required labour. “I was so tired, it was so stressful,” they share.

There’s a lot of shame to hold when the domestic fantasy cracks under pressure, and you struggle to nourish yourself. And it takes time to dispense with these ideals that don’t work. “Life has turned out different (than the norm) in many ways. I’m 32, I’m not married, I have no kids, and I am very publicly queer,” Riddhi adds.

So now, they don’t cook. But when Amala, their friend, comes home after a bad day and demands coffee, they say yes, I will. And when their partner cooks after a long day, they stand in the kitchen, and together, they shoot the shit. That’s the form that love and tenderness must take when it comes to food—to be able to demand care and refuse.

But come into my home, this shelf is yours, this spoon is yours, nourish yourself.

‘My kitchen welcomed all parts of me’

Ashish Sharma

I made pasta for the first time when I was nine years old. From scratch. It was a hot afternoon during my summer vacation, my mother wasn’t home, and the kitchen was at my full disposal. And fully dispose, I did: the bowl of ‘pasta’ featured—or dare I say wasted—besan in the dough, and sour curd in the sauce.

While the atrocious outcome of that afternoon went straight into the bin, putting it together was immensely fulfilling. There was something unlanguage-able about the experience of making food: using my hands to gather ingredients and knead dough, seeing my besan pasta transform from a mere thought into a tangible thing—slimy and grainy—on the kitchen counter. I felt proud of this uneatable thing I had made.

Since then, I have spent many summer afternoons making pasta. Most, thankfully edible, and some even quite delicious. Cooking quickly grew to become inseparable from how I saw myself, and food began to feel like a necessary escape, something forgiving I could return to after a hard day.

So when bullies at school laughed at my effeminate ways, I’d come home, pour that bottled-up angst into aggressively chopping chocolate for cookie dough, patiently scoop the pulp from ripe custard apples to make my father’s favourite kulfi, and do the dishes for fun. It was a strange hobby to have.

The dictionary will tell you that the word queer is a synonym for strange. Although it took me two decades of drifting in denial to associate queerness with pride, I now realise that food has been a crucial part of that journey. The pride I felt in feeding my loved ones, and myself, often won over the pervasive feeling of guilt and shame that came with being queer. The kitchen welcomed all parts of me, the bits of me that made mistakes, like splitting milk from overspilling anger, and the bits that I couldn’t get myself to be proud of just yet.

The pride I felt in feeding my loved ones, and myself, often won over the pervasive feeling of guilt and shame that came with being queer.

I read somewhere that when a person begins openly identifying as queer, it isn’t about stepping out of the closet once and for all. It is about the closet getting bigger. As my closet continues to get larger and warmer, I hope for my dining table to expand too—with people snacking, sharing, beaming, and laughing when I tell them about the silly pasta I made when I was nine. And this time, for all the right reasons.

This story has been written by Ashish himself. He is the Digital Media Lead at The Locavore.

‘To cook for Shamini is not just an act of love, it’s something else’

Mabel Mirza

“During winter, the dhaniya and methi I grew were so aromatic, I immediately sent the first batch to Vqueeram,” Mabel shares. “And I asked them, can you teach me to make a really kickass, balanced dhaniye ki chutney?” Even when Mabel and his best friend Vqueeram aren’t able to regularly update each other about the goings-on of their lives, they still share recipes.

“Food, of course, is a universal marker of care, be it in our chosen families or natal homes,” says Mabel, who identifies as a trans masc/non-binary person. But there is a difference between how this care appears in both sets of relationships. For many queer people, their natal homes, or birth homes, are the first sites of violence towards their bodies and selves.

“Food, as a form of care, had a different meaning before I had the language for my queerness, it was extractive,” he recalls. He found that food and the care it implied appeared as a tool for conditional love, a love that denied his queerness, and destroyed his sense of self. After moving to Delhi, where he carefully and painstakingly built his chosen family, his relationship with food morphed into something new: food as an act of care. It just was, without asking for anything in return.

In the recent past, Mabel and his family have cooked elaborate meals during new year’s eves. The celebration involves “talo-ing 40 to 50 luchis, and serving them hot,” and watching his loved ones lap up round after round of piping fried dough with spicy, fragrant chicken kosha. For him, this is beyond rewarding; it makes standing in a hot kitchen worth it. The deep sensory joy in watching your loved ones relish something you have cooked is hard to describe; words feel wholly inadequate in capturing such visceral pleasures. So, in response, one eats alongside.

After moving to Delhi, where he carefully and painstakingly built his chosen family, his relationship with food morphed into something new: food as an act of care.

Shamini, Mabel’s partner, and he find joint ecstasy in food. “To cook for Shamini, it’s not just an act of love, it’s something else. The first time I made mutton kosha for her, to see her eating it, and just devour the meat, the joy that it gave her, very few things would be able to turn me on like that,” says Mabel. For him, intimacy with anybody, in any relationship, is impossible in the absence of food and eating. “I’ve seen a lot of people romanticise food, but nobody quite practises it like Shamini does. She could be having the worst day and would still use the last of her energy to make a meal as a presentation to herself.”

‘I can make amti dal in my sleep’

Ruchi Sawardekar

Ruchi Sawardekar finds that her love language is acts of service and gifts, expressed through food and feeding. For her brother’s birthday, she always, always makes marble cake. Warm and moist layers of vanilla and chocolate snake through each other; the recipe for this cake has remained the same over years, ever since her mother first baked it.

Ruchi’s mother, Mohini, has never liked to cook. Apart from amti dal—a Maharashtrian dal preparation made with tamarind or kokum—which she learned from her mother, and passed it down to Ruchi. Ruchi claims she can now make it in her sleep. Mohini only ever cooked to feed her family. Growing up, Ruchi, who usually took cheese and cucumber sandwiches to school, would hear friends talk about their mothers feeding them until they almost burst. In her sixties now, Mohini enjoys bringing home samosas and matar karanji to have with tea. So, it isn’t that she doesn’t like to eat, she just doesn’t like to cook.

Meanwhile, Ruchi’s grandmother, Sindhu, found delight in cooking for her brother and her. She layered fried rice, mashed potatoes, and macaroni to make absurd renditions of ‘pie’, and gobi manchurian using recipes from her trusty Marathi cookbook for Chinese cooking. While for her grandmother, cooking represented experimenting and the freedom to be whimsical, for her mother, it was simply a thing to do. It was never tied to how much love she felt for her children, or how they experienced her love. Expressing your love through cooking has nothing to do with motherhood.

While living with her flatmate in Mumbai a few years ago, intimacy for Ruchi started to look like deciding what to eat, spending hours cooking in their shared kitchen, and simply doing life together. Having observed her mother, she never viewed food as inherently tied to the traditional family unit, and implied roles of being a mother and a wife; imagining food as separate from the ‘family’ has been a way for Ruchi to understand her asexuality.

Imagining food as separate from the ‘family’ has been a way for Ruchi to understand her asexuality.

“Taking away this heft that food holds as a way for mothers to love their children, I was really able to see how food can mean so much to other relationships, platonic ones,” says Ruchi. “I want to retire with my friends, and spend a life eating with them. I want to live with them as I grow old, and I want there to still be that connection through food, that we are able to cook for each other, with each other.”