Food for Thought

The kitchen is the place in our home where everyone comes to hang out. It’s where my kindergartner comes to get away from her workbook, my ten-year-old comes to escape his reading assignment, and my husband comes to destress and vent about his work day. One might even mistake it for a family room. It’s also a place where everyone loves to get their hands dirty and their stomachs full!

It all started with Thursday baking nights. I wasn’t a good baker and wanted a bonding activity with my little one. Hence, the tradition was born out of necessity. When my son was three years old, he and I began experimenting with easy recipes such as chocolate-covered strawberries. With time, we conquered eggless cookies, brownies, chocolate truffles, cinnamon rolls, and now our house favorite Rice Krispies treats! After my daughter was born, she, too, joined our baking nights!

The baking soon shifted to cooking, researching recipes (looking up and understanding ingredients, their origin, and cultural background), understanding nutritional facts, and exploring substitutions for non-vegetarian products with vegetarian counterparts. Italian, American, Japanese, Mexican, Cuban, Mediterranean, Thai, and Indian are some of the cuisines we experimented with on Friday and Saturday nights…and our list continues to grow!

Food is a natural communal and unifying factor in every culture, bringing unknown people together and families closer. Eating is a fundamental element of survival and with community, it results in bonding, sharing, and connecting as some of its beautiful side effects. The tradition of learning a recipe from a mother, father, grandmother, or aunt, can be full of innocent curiosity, a bit of fun, and a lot of mess, all while creating and experiencing precious and lasting moments.

Weaving these memories into a child’s life can be a beautiful sentiment but also great for their mental health as they bloom into young adults. Food can be a pleasant trigger, a point of safety, something that can remind them of the love they received from their family as a child. Sharing food while narrating life stories of laughter and struggle nourishes not only the body but also the soul. Cooking together can reduce emotional burden and help us to find comfort in each other.

Cooking together has also allowed my husband and I to teach gratitude and pass on Hindu traditions we learned from our parents when we were children. In our household, the first plate of food is always offered to the murtis of God in the form of a thaal. Accompanied by prayers sung to musical instruments, thaal is a way to express devotion to God and offer gratitude for the food that we have been given. The sanctified food, known as prasad, is then shared with everyone! Prasad, a Sanskrit word also meaning grace and joy, has elevated our daily collective cooking practice by bringing grace and joy into our home.

While we enjoy cooking together on Friday nights, we sometimes play our favorite music, jam alongside the cooking, and have a good ole’ Patel’s kitchen party! Our spiritual guru, His Holiness Pramukh Swami Maharaj, would often says:

‘The family that eats, works, plays, and prays together, stays together.’

There is more to just spending time together in the kitchen. Our family tenet is that what we put into our bodies shapes who we become. We are what we eat. And therefore, a pure diet is pertinent to pure living. The food we consume nourishes our minds along with our bodies. Bhagwan Swaminarayan has said in Vachanamrut Gadhada Section I-18:

‘Of the wide varieties of foods that a person eats, each has differing tastes and intrinsic qualities. When one eats that food, the intrinsic qualities of the food permeate and affect the mind and the entire body.’

If the mind remains pure, then there is an increased level of concentration, a certain level of focus that is not present otherwise. With such focus, mental and body fatigue, sluggishness, and unmotivated feelings can be abated. I see how true this is for me. I can start my day without any morning coffee or tea. I often get asked, “How do you always have so much energy?” I’m not sure it can be entirely attributed to a pure, homemade, vegetarian diet. Still, I’m certain a devotion-filled, nutritional cooking practice has something to do with it. With elevated levels of concentration and consciousness, I have better control of my senses. With such a diet, I can clearly assess what goes in my body via all five receptive organs.

As parents in the health profession, we both see and value the benefits of a wholesome diet hygiene and pure mindset. With meals prepared at home that cater to our family’s specific health needs and preferences, we try to help enable healthy habits in our children early on. Cooking at home as often as we can with quality ingredients carries numerous health benefits such as supporting our immune system, lowering calorie intake, reducing illnesses such as heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes and more. In fact, a study by Julia Wolfson and Sara Bleich demonstrated the benefits that mindful home cooking can reap. The study noted that restaurant meals tend to contain higher amounts of sodium, saturated fat, flavor enhancers, and, overall, more calories than home-cooked meals. As such, by cooking at home, we are able to directly control the quality and quantity of ingredients in our daily meals. Along with being able to connect with my loved ones in a fun way, we get to eat personalized food the family enjoys while also saving time! The “30-Minute Meal” has become a great hit at the Patel house!

Our culture has a famous saying: ‘Anna tevo odhkaar’. It roughly translates to “one belches what he has eaten.” Culturally, it has been extracted to mean that one’s dietary intake will transfer some effect to influence one’s thinking and actions. There is a transference of the preparer’s thoughts and sentiments during food preparation into the meal — and from the meal into the consumer. Similar to how the emotions and feelings of a sculptor are seen in his statues, painters in their paintings, songwriters in their lyrics, then also, a mother’s pure, spiritual, and healthy thoughts are considered to be transmitted into the food cooked and experienced by the whole family.

You are what you eat is not the end all be all to who we become; we are also what we see, read, act, think, and dream. Our genetics and our environment are also sure to shape us. I love that my family and I are able to come together to share the joy of cooking while incorporating spirituality and recreating beautiful memories of the tradition I had grown up with.

Dr. Shatabdi Patel, Miami, FL
Neurologist, Interventional Pain Management

Referenced Articles:
Is cooking at home associated with better diet quality or weight-loss intention?

Julia A Wolfson 1, Sara N Bleich 1 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Wolfson+JA&cauthor_id=25399031