Do you think food is love?

“How come there is no food at home when you just got back from a long overseas trip?”

My then-boyfriend (now husband) asked over text.

It was 2015. I had just arrived in my hometown after living in Hamburg, Germany, for three months to pursue a social entrepreneurship fellowship. Upon landing, I went straight home and was going to order something through delivery.

I saw no problem in that until my boyfriend asked. At first, I could not fathom what was wrong based on his question. It sure looked like normalcy to me.

At that time, both my boyfriend and I had to travel a lot for our respective jobs. He traveled more frequently albeit the trips were usually shorter than mine. He then told me that after every trip, regardless of what time he arrives home and whether their parents were still awake or not, there would always be some food on the table waiting for him.

I was baffled. I did not know it was a thing. I grew up having to be somewhat self-sufficient, so I never saw it as an “issue” if there were no food on the table. Maybe my parents were busy, maybe the food had been cleaned up, maybe they thought I already had my dinner, and other similar excuses I made up in my mind.

“Food is love, you know?” He said.

I’m relatively closer to my parents than he was to his parents. He does not talk to them every day, especially when he’s traveling, but the food is always there.

I had never thought about it that way.

Back then, I saw food only for its function. As long as it gets the tummy filled, I did not care too much about where it came from.

When I was little, my mother hustled as a single mother who had to work. So, she either gave me daily pocket money to buy food from the canteen or subscribed to a “catering” service provided by another parent. Sometimes she cooked on the weekends once every few months, if she had the time. Food is love, yes, but it showed up in the forms of ordering pizza on movie nights or eating out to celebrate something instead of making them at home.

As I grew older and had my own money, I would just buy the food that I want. With so many things I wanted to do and “achieve”, spending one hour to cook daily seemed suboptimal to me.

Food was also at the center of celebrations, but more of restaurant food instead of home food. It never occurred to me that home food could have been something special too.

When I got married in the same year I completed the fellowship, I had ZERO knowledge of cooking. I could not even cook fried rice! My husband witnessed all the cooking mishaps, tried to guide me through it (and sometimes failed to do so because I was too proud to be constantly mentored), and still ate what was edible. Thankfully. 😅

For me, cooking was different than baking. I could and was already used to baking. Baking is exact science. Use a certain amount of thing, mix in a certain amount of time, bake at a specific temperature for a specific period, and then it would be successful. Cooking was very different to that. I could follow a recipe as hard as I could, still it turned out inedible.

A few years later, my eldest was born and I for sure had to cook for him.

“Who knows, maybe our kid(s) will grow up remembering and being fond of your cooking?”

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So, now, it’s been around 7 years of trying to cook every day. Some days my husband does not eat my cooking (he’s a much better cook!), but my eldest always eats my food. (Sometimes he gives it a thumbs up or sometimes in the middle if he believes I could do better.) We still eat out, yes, but probably only for one mealtime per week on the weekend.

As he’s already in primary school, it involves having to wake up at 5 or 6 AM every day to prepare his breakfast and lunch box. All the love I had, I poured it in, by showing up every single morning, even on days when it was hard.

I think I started showing up for me too. I realised that sometimes I can try to cook some food that I want to eat, not just buy them somewhere. I can take the time to be more intentional in what I consume — that “spending an hour to cook” is not suboptimal, but should be a part of the every day life. I could learn to enjoy thus one hour stretch as the time to craft something for the people I care about.

I still have a long way to go but I dearly hope this would mean something for my kids, that the love transcends through food. I am far from perfect. Perhaps the least I could do is to consistently show up for them in the ways that were possible for me.