Khichuri in Secret, Coq au Vin on Stage
I order moong dal khichuri—a simple rice-lentil porridge—from the street vendor with the same embarrassment other people reserve for confessing minor crimes. Eyes down, voice low, money ready—the universal body language of someone procuring what they need but wish they didn’t want.
But ask me about the coq au vin I made last month, and watch my posture change. Shoulders back, detailed descriptions of wine reduction techniques, casual mentions of the French cooking class I took online. This is food I’m proud to claim, food that elevates my social status rather than revealing my fundamental human neediness.
Why do we perform this hierarchy of appetite? Why do sophisticated tastes make us interesting while comfort foods make us apologetic?
The answer lives in the intersection of class, culture, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are versus who we wish to be. Comfort foods betray our origins, our moments of weakness, our regression to childhood dependencies. They’re autobiographical in ways that make us uncomfortable—too revealing, too honest, too connected to versions of ourselves we’ve outgrown or think we should have outgrown.
Khichuri tells the story of sick days and maternal care, of times when my stomach couldn’t handle complexity and needed the simplest possible nourishment. It’s food that remembers my vulnerability, my need for tending, my reduction to basic human requirements.
Coq au vin, meanwhile, tells the story of sophistication acquired, of palate development, of cultural capital accumulated through effort and education. It’s food that suggests I’ve evolved beyond mere survival into the realm of aesthetic appreciation.
But here’s the brutal honesty: comfort foods often taste better. Not just because they’re familiar, but because they’re designed by centuries of maternal instinct and community wisdom to provide exactly what our bodies crave when stripped of pretense. They’re functional perfection, refined through generations of people who needed food to comfort, not impress.
The khichuri from the street vendor contains more genuine satisfaction than any elaborate dish I’ve Instagram-photographed. It connects me to something primal and necessary—the deep mammalian need for warm, soft, easily digestible nutrients that remind our nervous systems that we’re safe, we’re cared for, we’re home.
Yet I hide this preference like a shameful secret, as if admitting to craving comfort food reveals some failure of sophistication, some inability to transcend my basic programming.
This shame around comfort foods is really shame around needing comfort at all. In a culture that valorizes independence and emotional self-sufficiency, admitting that sometimes we need the edible equivalent of a maternal embrace feels like admitting weakness.
But what if it’s actually wisdom? What if our comfort food cravings represent our inner compass still functioning correctly, still knowing what we need despite our conscious minds’ sophisticated pretensions?
The friends who respect me most aren’t impressed by my cooking ambitions—they’re the ones who’ve seen me eat rice and pickles directly from the pot while standing in the kitchen, who know that beneath whatever culinary persona I’ve constructed lies someone who sometimes just needs simple food and the memory of being taken care of.
There’s profound honesty in comfort food that sophisticated cuisine can’t match. Sophisticated food is about performance, about demonstrating cultural knowledge and refined preferences. Comfort food is about survival, about returning to what works when everything else feels uncertain.
Maybe the shame we feel around comfort foods is really grief—grief for the parts of ourselves that still need simple pleasures, that haven’t transcended the basic human requirements for warmth and safety and uncomplicated nourishment.
The next time I order khichuri, I’ll try to meet the vendor’s eyes. Not because I’m proud of needing comfort, but because I’m no longer ashamed of being human enough to require it.
Some appetites deserve apology. The appetite for comfort isn’t one of them.
