Losing Touch With my Food

Back in elementary school, when I still lived in Shanghai I frequented this restaurant by the name of “Les Beauties Stone Hotpot”. They had this soup I really liked, where after paying and anxiously waiting, they would take out a special tray filled with garlic, pickled apples and oranges, shallots and herbs; place a metal shield in front of you to prevent the oil from splashing onto you, and begin to fry the aromatics. The smell was heavenly. Little me would always stand on the seat in order to look over the shield to get more of the smell. When the frying was finished and the broth was poured in, you would get this delicately sweet and acid flavour from the soup. Most people at that point would cook their meat and their vegetables, dip it into sauce and be done with it. Not me. I would take all my vegetables and dump them straight into the pot: corn for sweetness, mushrooms for a little extra umami. Then the kicker: thin strips of fatty beef, to be all boiled in the broth to leach out every speck of beef oil. The result was heavenly: a rich, savory, sweet and fat concoction that I would pour over my rice. Delicious. And then covid happened, and the place closed, and suddenly my favorite restaurant was gone. 

The food I have had in the past is better than what I have now. It wasn’t simply just because each dish was more flavorful, but the entire dining experience was more anticipated. I had a long list of favorite restaurants that I would religiously go on a regular cycle, favorite meals that I have painstakingly hunted across restaurants in each of the cities I had lived in to find the restaurant that makes the perfect version of the food. There was a ritualised way of eating each dish, which focused my whole attention on what was before me. 

In middle school, I would religiously go to Sushi Express every Friday night without exception. There was a whole routine to it too. Make tea, fill the soy sauce tray, add wasabi to the side of the soy sauce but never mix it in. The first order was always the imitation krabs, miso soup and steam egg. The krabs will always appear first, alongside shredded cabbage and sweet mayo. I would always carefully try to separate the cabbage and krabs from the mayo, eat them, and save the mayo for some of the sushi dishes. The miso soup and steamed egg was next. I would reserve the spoon I got for the steam egg, and give a blessing to it, dubbing it the spoon of the ceremony. This spoon would be used instead to eat desert. I then use the spoon for the miso soup to eat the steamed egg and to drink the miso soup. Did all of these contrived steps make any of the food taste better? Chemically, of course not. But it made you feel fun, like the food had some sort of significance. 

And, of course, the actual taste of the food itself. When you get older, taste buds change. But so does color, size and most importantly, your sense of the world. When I was younger, eating at Ikea was more exciting than going to Disneyland. The bright designs of the showrooms, the endless bends, the warehouse that the bottom with shelves that grew to the height of trees, it made it so that the eventual descent to the checkout line felt well anticipated. The hotdogs there used to be so large too. I could barely hold the entire thing with my toddler hands, the long sausage sticking well out of the smaller bun, so that there were 4 guaranteed bites of meat. Now that I am twice the size of what I was before, and the hotdog now fits snugly inside my palm. 

It becomes hard to go back to that moment of sublimeness where the world stops and you become sucked into this small dance with the flavors in front of you; when the colors, the temperature, even how bright the lights align, and the umami reels in every external thought. If you find yourself unable to recreate all of these new sensations, how do you re-explore your past favorite meals? It is like getting covid, losing your sense of smell, and having your taste diminished.

I am lucky to find some comfort in the new foods that I eat. Tea and curry puffs at the hawkers, ice cream from Scoop in the Woods. Sometimes, that old moment hits again: cold cuts now warm, out of the fridge and in your mouth, the salts and the fats slowly coaxed out. But the majority of time, what I eat has become subconscious to me. Eating becomes less of a sense and more of a habit. I’m left thinking of due dates or school trips or video games while I’m chewing, the joy in each dish ultimately lost on me.