Grief & Comfort Food
For palliative care nurse and artist Roshni Kavate, the food we eat and our rituals around it tap into something deeper, something generational. Each meal and snack is a chance to connect with a part of ourselves and our heritage, here she explains how.
Lemon rice is my ultimate comfort food. It has fragrant rice as a base, toasted peanuts for the perfect crunch, lemon for zing, curry leaves for aromatics and tangy green mango for a surprising finish. I ate this lemon rice with my family at festivals, on long train and bus journeys to visit grandparents, or as a satisfying quick meal after coming home from a long trip with nothing but dry goods in the pantry. The peanuts are a reminder of another era for me. My childhood is filled with memories of eating freshly boiled peanuts strewn on a newspaper with my mother, grandmother and the rest of my family. The salty broth of a freshly boiled peanut is ambrosia for me.
My grandmother is no longer alive, and I live across the world from my mom. But when I miss home, when I am sad, when I am celebrating, I always look back to the comfort foods of my family. Craving the comfort of food in hard times and good times is universal, as is the grief we carry within our bodies. It could be the loss of loved ones, of lives and dreams we imagined together but are now gone. Of not knowing the land of our birth, being rejected, the grief of yearning to be accepted, home, and being well in our bodies. Cooking and eating are primal rituals that we partake in every day. They nourish our bodies, heal our spirit, remind us of where we come from, and connect us with our resilient ancestors.
In my experience as a palliative care nurse, I was struck by my patients’ wishes at the end of their lives. They would yearn for a bright green mango with bagoong from their childhood—one they still remembered 70 years later. They would long for the warmth of a pot of beans, the lovingly wrapped onigiri with a vibrant umeboshi plum, and a fragrant sweet potato pie with cinnamon to celebrate the holidays.
Grief can feel like a cloudy, numb existence where we feel we are fading from life. Yet grief is a visceral invitation to rediscover the sensuality of our being. We can offer our grieving self sweetness with a bowl of fruit, or a moment of ease with a cup of rich broth. A pot of stew can be an unspoken yet powerful reassurance for a dear friend. It is an act of deep care and a step towards re-humanizing ourselves.
Reclaiming my ancestral comfort foods has turned into an act of political practice for me. My family first suffered under British colonization and then struggled in post-partition India, losing their vibrant legacy as artisans and entrepreneurs. There was a palpable darkness and gloom that I couldn’t identify, but alongside this generational trauma, I also remember plump little shrimp with ginger and golden onions, goat leg curries, hearty heirloom greens, and flatbreads made with grains harvested fresh that season. I remember turmeric, ginger, chillies and coriander carefully sun-dried and blended at the mill next door. A home-cooked meal was, and still is, a reminder of the power of choosing joy in the face of despair and survival.
I remember my dad casually slipping me chilli coconut-dusted peanuts and a sip of ice-cold sudsy Indian beer at age 12 as a precursor to a long mutton biryani lunch with my extended family. When I cook a lamb biryani on a Sunday, I am celebrating my longing for meals that were cooked and eaten as a large intergenerational family, unhurried, with the comfort of knowing you will always be fed and always be cared for.
Each time we cook our ancestral foods, we are keeping the memories of our families alive and affirming our own vitality no matter the depth of grief within us. We are remembering the taste of ease: a ripe, juicy whole mango as an invitation to awaken the intelligence in our cellular memory. Food and cooking can offer a balm for our grief. If we can listen to it and befriend it, it can unearth the wisdom of returning to our wholeness.
Lately, my grief has been craving dal, rice, ghee eaten with my hands, garlicky clams, bucatini piled high with spicy tomato sauce, and bowls of okra with crispy onions.
My invitation is to ask yourself: what is my grief craving?