When Your Palate Evolves Faster Than Your Past
The chole bhature sits untouched, cooling into disappointed mediocrity while I stare at it like an archaeologist confronting evidence of a civilization I no longer understand.
This used to be my favorite meal. For fifteen years, every birthday, every celebration, every moment requiring culinary comfort led here—to this exact combination of spiced chickpeas and fried bread that once represented peak happiness. Now it just looks heavy, greasy, unnecessarily complicated. When did my body become a foreign country that no longer welcomes its former citizens?
The sadness isn’t about the food—it’s about the realization that we can outgrow parts of ourselves so completely that returning becomes impossible, not just impractical but genuinely undesirable.
Growing up, we expect to outgrow clothes, toys, childish behaviors. We don’t expect to outgrow the very pleasures that once defined us, to wake up one day and discover that our most reliable sources of joy have become strangers.
This is different from changing preferences. Preferences evolve gradually, with awareness, with choice. This is metamorphosis—sudden, irreversible, leaving you looking at your former self’s favorite things with the bewildered compassion you might feel for a well-meaning friend whose taste you can no longer fathom.
The child who craved chole bhature had different biochemistry, different needs, different relationship with his own body. He could process this richness effortlessly, could find genuine satisfaction in foods that now trigger more digestive discomfort than pleasure. That child lived in a body optimized for immediate gratification, unconcerned with consequences that seemed impossibly distant.
But here’s what I didn’t expect: the grief that accompanies this evolution. It’s the grief of losing access to simple pleasures, of having to explain to well-meaning friends why the foods they remember you loving no longer bring joy. It’s the loneliness of having outgrown touchstones that once provided reliable comfort.
“You used to finish two plates,” the restaurant owner says with genuine confusion, as if my appetite were a personal betrayal of our shared history. And in some way, it is. I’ve betrayed the version of myself he knew, the version that provided continuity to his own understanding of human nature.
There’s something existentially unsettling about outgrowing foundational preferences. If I can become someone who doesn’t enjoy what I once loved most, what other fundamental aspects of my identity are temporary? What other certainties are just phases I haven’t outgrown yet?
Maybe this is what aging really means: not just physical decay, but the constant process of becoming incompatible with previous versions of yourself, of watching your former enthusiasms recede like abandoned toys in the rearview mirror of maturation.
The chole bhature remains untouched. I’ll pay for it, apologize to the disappointed server, walk home carrying the strange sadness that comes with recognizing your own evolution in real time.
But perhaps there’s also liberation in this sadness. If I can outgrow beloved foods, I can probably outgrow beloved limitations, beloved fears, beloved patterns that no longer serve who I’m becoming. The same mechanism that makes yesterday’s comfort food today’s burden might also make today’s anxieties tomorrow’s forgotten concerns.
The palate evolves. The self evolves. What we mourn and what we celebrate might be the same process, viewed from different angles of acceptance.
Tonight I’ll eat something that satisfies who I am now, not who I was then. And maybe that’s not loss—maybe that’s just life, tasting its way forward, one outgrown preference at a time.
