Taste: The Stories We Tell Ourselves About What We Like

Last weekend I made spaghetti for dinner. Sauteed zucchini and carrots. A sour apple salad I was disproportionately pleased with. It was a deviation from what dinner usually looks like in our house, which is some combination of dal, sabzi, raita, and roti. The kind of meal that doesn’t need explaining. This one did, slightly, just by being different. Everyone ate. No one complained, they even liked and praised the spaghetti. If you cook even occasionally, you know that’s already a reasonable outcome.

Afterwards, we were talking about the meal the way you do when something is slightly outside routine, and somewhere in that conversation I said it out loud. That I think I prefer this kind of dinner. Grilled protein, sauteed vegetables, something lighter, something structured differently. That given a choice most days, I’d take this over a full Indian spread. My husband said he enjoys the occasional deviation. But his preference, without having to think too hard about it, is a simple home cooked Indian meal. Not as a consolation. Just as a fact about himself, stated plainly.

And that is what stayed with me. The difference in preference, and how settled it felt on both sides. Well, there is a contradiction here.

We grew up in almost identical homes. Middle class, urban, Indian. Mothers who cooked Indian food every day, and cooked it well. Eating out was an event, a weekend ritual, never an everyday affair. Even when we ate out, it was something Indian at first. Other cuisines arrived slowly, in their most familiar forms first. Indian Chinese. Then pizza. Then fast food that felt foreign enough to be exciting and routine enough to stop being either. I was well into my teens before I had what could genuinely be called a continental meal, a buffet my father took us to, food that didn’t mix into each other, plates that looked deliberate, a whole system of eating that was different from the one I had grown up inside.

Same starting point. Different destinations. Taste. And you know what, it doesn’t stay contained to food.

I realised sometime well into my thirties that I don’t like busy prints. On clothes, on accesories, on home decor. I prefer classic vertical stripes, checks, small polka dots, florals that are not too densely packed together. I prefer beige sandals over shiny black heels. Give me a plain textured bag over one with detailing and design any day. My home has followed the same logic without my entirely planning it that way, metal, rattan, the occasional crystal, muted gold and black with red appearing sometimes, carefully. No ceramics. No sudden bursts of colour. You see the pattern here? Classic, simple, nothing that screams for attention.

And then there are my sarees. When I started buying my own, I picked traditional weaves and prints. Ikkats, Kalamkari, Ajrakh, dense prints, intricate patterns, the kind of visual complexity I apparently cannot tolerate anywhere else. I have thought about this contradiction and I don’t have a clean explanation for it. The saree operates by different rules, or perhaps older ones, and my taste in that specific context is a completely different conversation from my taste everywhere else.

Which perhaps illustrates that taste is not one coherent thing. It simply presents itself as coherent. That is part of how it works. You say I prefer this and it sounds like a settled position, something that came from somewhere real and consistent inside you. It feels like certainty rather than conclusion. You don’t usually find yourself thinking about when you decided or what shaped the decision or whether decision is even the right word for something that arrived so gradually.

I am a foodie in the way that people who don’t especially enjoy cooking can still be foodies. The eating is the point. I watched food and travel shows as a teenager with a dedication I have never quite matched in any formal area of study. To this day I make an omelette the way Chef Sanjeev Kapoor demonstrated on Khana Khazana, not the way my mother did, which she has either forgiven or decided isn’t worth raising. Chef Jamie Oliver taught me to salt tomatoes and let them drain before adding to a salad. Chef Ranveer Brar walked me through pizza from scratch during Covid, when making pizza from scratch felt like a reasonable response to everything.

None of this made me like cooking, mind you. But curiosity, repeated often enough, starts to look like preference. And preference, repeated often enough, starts to feel like just how you are.

I have sat in enough food conversations to know that taste is not always a private matter. Say the wrong thing in the wrong room and the consequences are social. I once mentioned, among people who had opinions about these things, that I don’t like heeng. The look I received suggested this was not information I was entitled to casually share. The poached versus boiled egg debate, if you have ever wandered into one, is not really about eggs. What you eat, what you refuse to eat, what you wear and what you won’t, how your home looks when people come into it, these are all being read, whether you intended them as statements or not.

Taste begins with what was available. What was repeated. What was presented as normal, and then later, what was presented as worth wanting. I didn’t grow up eating continental food. I grew up watching it on screens, encountering it occasionally in spaces where it came with a different kind of attention, food that was described and explained and treated as something to experience rather than just consume. The story around it was different. And somewhere in that difference, a preference formed.

My husband’s preference stayed closer to where we both began. Mine moved. The wardrobe took years to quietly rebuild. The home accumulated its metals and rattans and muted tones without a single conscious decision that I can point to. The sarees remained their own category entirely, resisting the logic I had apparently applied everywhere else.

None of it feels constructed when you are living inside it. That is probably the point.

Taste is what you keep and what you leave out, repeated consistently enough that it starts to look like a self. Not performed, not deliberate, just the accumulation of a thousand small selections that each felt like nothing more than preference at the time.

We like to think it reveals something true about us. It does. Just not always something we chose.

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This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .

This is a series about storytelling beyond a craft. As something we live inside. In memory, in conversation, and in the way we understand what happens to us. Read all posts here.

I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.