Food Builds Memory. Childhood Builds Character. And Some People Build Nothing.
Personal Essay · Neuroscience · Family · Hard Truths
I Cook. I Think. I Finally Understand.
What my kitchen taught me about the brain, what the brain taught me about childhood, and what one person in my family taught me about the price of getting it all wrong.
I am not a chef. I am a person who cooks with obsession and intention — because somewhere along the way I understood that food is not just sustenance. Food is memory architecture. Food is the language the brain uses to speak to its own past. Food cooked with love becomes the warmest room a child's mind will ever live in. And the absence of that warmth? That is where this story gets dark.
The Kitchen is My Laboratory
I have a few dishes that I have cooked hundreds of times and still think about before I begin. Not because they are complicated — because they demand presence. You cannot be distracted when you are doing these right. And that discipline of presence, I would later discover, is exactly what makes food so powerful in the brain.
Slow Mutton
Mutton does not forgive impatience. The fat must be rendered slowly, the spices bloomed without burning, the pressure built and released at exactly the right moment. You cannot rush it. When you get it right, the meat surrenders completely — and so does everyone at the table. This is not cooking. This is an act of will.
Dal — The Honest Dish
Dal is deceptive in its simplicity. Anyone can make it. But the version that stops people mid-conversation — that requires layers. The right tempering. The right water. The moment the mustard seeds pop. Dal is the most democratic food there is, and in the right hands, it is also the most profound. It is the dish that most often unlocks memory.
Pizza — Where I Broke the Rules
When I first made pizza at home, I ignored every Italian rule — and found something more honest. My own version. Thicker, spiced differently, built for my palate and my people. Pizza taught me that the best cooking is not imitation. It is conversation — between tradition and who you actually are.
Curd — The Quiet One
Setting curd is about creating the perfect environment and then leaving it alone. Too much heat — it breaks. Too little — it never sets. The right warmth, the right culture, the right patience. Every parent reading this should sit with that metaphor for a moment. It maps directly onto raising a child.
These four dishes taught me one thing above everything else: the person eating carries the food into their nervous system as an experience, not just as nutrition. What they feel at that table — the safety, the warmth, the presence of someone who cared enough to cook with intention — gets encoded. And it stays.
The dish is forgotten. The feeling of being fed with love never is. The brain keeps it forever — buried, waiting, ready to surface when the right smell finds it forty years later.
Why Food is the Most Powerful Memory Trigger in the Human Brain
When I began understanding the neuroscience behind what happens to a person when they smell or taste something from childhood, I found myself reading at 2am and unable to stop. Because it explained everything — not just about food, but about people.
Every sense except smell and taste is processed through the thalamus — the brain's relay station — before reaching the emotional centres. But smell and taste take a direct route to the amygdala (the brain's emotional core) and the hippocampus (the memory consolidation centre). This means food hits your emotions before your rational brain even processes what is happening.
SEC
A familiar smell from childhood triggers an emotional response in under 100 milliseconds — faster than language, faster than recognition, faster than memory as we consciously understand it. The feeling arrives before the thought. This is why the smell of a specific food can make grown adults cry before they even understand why.
Now here is where it connects to childhood in a way that should make every parent sit up straight. The childhood brain is in a state of peak neural plasticity — it is building itself from experience, and every experience during these years is encoded with disproportionate emotional weight. The brain is not storing photographs. It is storing entire experiential packages: the taste of the food, the warmth of the person who made it, the sound of the house, the feeling of being safe, being seen, being loved — all bundled into a single neural cluster.
Decades later, the taste or smell acts as a key that unlocks the whole package simultaneously. This is the Proust Phenomenon — named after Marcel Proust's famous scene where a madeleine cookie dipped in tea flooded him with his entire childhood. Neuroscientists have since confirmed exactly why this happens at the biological level.
BN
The brain has 86 billion neurons. The connections between them — formed by experience — number around 100 trillion. In an LLM like a large language model, training data shapes the model's weights. In a human brain, lived experience shapes the neural weights. The parallel is not metaphorical — it is structural. Both systems are fundamentally shaped by what they are exposed to during their formation period. Garbage in, garbage out. Warmth in, warmth out.
Think about that LLM parallel for a moment. When we train an AI model on biased, low-quality, or toxic data — the model produces biased, toxic outputs. It cannot help it. That is what it was built on. A child raised in an environment of neglect, chaos, disrespect, and absence — is not morally inferior. They were trained on corrupted data during the most sensitive weight-setting period of their existence.
This is why what happens at the family table — who cooks, how they cook, whether people eat together, whether conversation flows, whether the atmosphere is warm or cold, loud or loving — is not a small thing. It is foundational neural programming. It is the pre-training phase of a human being.
Food at the Family Table is Not About the Food.
It is about co-regulation — the nervous systems of family members synchronizing. It is about language development — the table is where children learn to listen, argue, explain, and understand. It is about emotional safety — the consistent signal that says "you belong here, you are fed, you are loved." And it is about modeling — children absorb how adults treat each other, speak to each other, and handle difficulty. They take all of it into their nervous systems as their definition of normal.
Beyond food, the three pillars that build a functioning human being are non-negotiable. Strip any of them and something fundamental breaks — not just in that generation, but in the next one too.
Respect
A child who is respected learns to respect. A child who is disrespected learns to survive — and survival does not look like dignity.
Education
Not just school. The education of emotional intelligence, values, consequence, and the understanding that effort builds lives.
Empathy
The ability to feel what others feel. Without it, a person is functionally alone even in a room full of people — and they make everyone around them lonely too.
Now Let Me Tell You About Suwarin.
What follows is not gossip. It is not cruelty. It is the documentation of what happens to a family — and the children inside it — when one person carries unresolved damage and refuses to examine it. Every family has a Suwarin. Understanding them is not the same as excusing them.
I did not arrive at these thirteen traits from a book. I arrived at them from years of watching, enduring, and — finally — understanding. This is not theory. This is lived.
I have sat across the table from Suwarin more times than I can count. I have watched her receive help from people who gave more than they could afford — financially, emotionally, in time and energy — and then watched that same person be spoken about with contempt the following week. I have seen the shock on helpers' faces when they realised what had happened. I have felt it myself.
I have watched her walk into situations where silence or one kind word would have changed everything — and instead, the coarsest possible language arrived first. Not in anger. As a default. As the first gear the engine knows. I used to think it was stress. Then I realised it was simply the only vocabulary she had ever been given.
I have watched the repeated mistakes — not once, not twice, but across years and decades — each time accompanied by the same genuine surprise, the same search for external causes, the same absence of any internal reckoning. And I have watched the children in the orbit of all this begin to mirror it back — in small ways first, then in ways that are no longer small.
It took me a long time — and a deep dive into neuroscience, childhood development, and the architecture of memory — to stop being angry and start being curious. What happened to her? What was absent in her childhood that produced this? Because nothing about this is random. Every single trait on the list below is traceable to a specific gap — a specific thing that was missing when her neural architecture was being built, when the soil was soft, when it still could have been shaped into something that knew how to love and be loved without damage.
There was no emotional safety. I believe she grew up in an environment where love was conditional — withdrawn when she failed, weaponised when it was convenient. Where emotions were not discussed but discharged. Where the adults around her were themselves carrying wounds they had never examined, and those wounds expressed themselves as harshness, inconsistency, and the particular cruelty of unpredictability.
I believe she was never genuinely seen. Not her feelings, not her confusion, not her needs. She was managed — fed, clothed, kept — but not attuned to. The difference between being kept and being seen is the difference between surviving and developing. She survived. But the development of empathy, gratitude, self-reflection, and the ability to trust — these require being seen. They require someone to sit with you in your difficulty and say: I see you. It makes sense. You are not alone. That person was either absent or unavailable.
I believe she grew up surrounded by bad-mouthing, low talk, and the social currency of gossip — because that is the only way she knows how to bond. I believe she was lied to by the people who were supposed to be her foundation — which is why lying became a reflex rather than a choice. I believe accountability in her home was enforced through shame and punishment rather than through understanding — which is why she cannot bear to look inward even now.
And I believe education — in her home — was either unavailable, dismissed, or actively undermined. Not as malice. As the unconscious passing-on of a limitation that the generation before her also carried. A ceiling inherited intact. And now, being placed on the next generation with the same unconscious fidelity.
This is why I say — with sorrow, not judgment — that these traits are beyond repair at this stage. Not because people cannot change. But because change requires awareness, and awareness requires the willingness to look inward. That willingness was the first casualty of her childhood. And without it, no external force — no amount of love, patience, confrontation, or time — can do what only self-examination can do.
Thirteen behavioural traits from my personal experience with Suwarin. No softening. No polishing. Just what it is — and what it costs everyone around it.
No Respect. For Anyone.
Suwarin speaks to people as though their presence is a minor inconvenience. Elders, helpers, family members who have given years — dismissed, interrupted, talked over.
The cost: Children watching this learn that people do not matter. That strength means dismissal. They carry this into every relationship they will ever have.
Forgets Every Good Deed. Remembers Every Grievance. Then Backstabs.
People have helped Suwarin in ways that cost them enormously — money, time, reputation, emotional labour. Not only is none of this remembered — the same people are spoken about, undermined, and betrayed the moment there is something to gain or a narrative to shift.
The cost: Anyone who helps learns the hard way. The tragedy is that Suwarin genuinely cannot see the pattern. The brain never built the architecture for gratitude or loyalty. And the children watching learn that people who help you are either tools or threats.
Extremely Bad Language — As a First Reflex
Not in moments of extreme stress. As a default register. As the first tool that comes out. Coarse, cutting, degrading — directed at children, spouse, relatives, anyone within range.
The cost: Every child's brain absorbs this as the language of emotion. When they feel angry, scared, frustrated — this is the vocabulary they reach for. The cycle perpetuates itself through the next generation's mouths before they even understand why.
Bad Mouth — Poisoning Every Room
No one escapes Suwarin's commentary. Neighbours, relatives, the children's teachers, anyone who has ever done anything — dissected, criticised, torn apart, usually behind their back, often with embellishment.
The cost: Children raised in this environment develop a worldview where everyone is suspect, everyone has an agenda, nobody can be trusted. This is not healthy scepticism. It is social paranoia — and it destroys their ability to form genuine relationships for life.
Lying — The Default Language
Small lies, large lies, unnecessary lies, lies told so reflexively that the truth would have been easier and safer. Lies that have been caught and still not acknowledged. Lying as a way of being in the world.
The cost: Children in this environment lose their calibration for truth. They either become liars themselves — because it was modeled as normal — or they develop deep anxiety and inability to trust anyone, because their earliest truth-teller could not be trusted. Both outcomes are devastating.
Repeated Mistakes — Forever, With Surprise Each Time
The same decisions. The same conflicts. The same outcomes. And each time, genuine shock — as though this has never happened before. No accumulation of learning. No change of approach. The same wall, the same collision, the same expression of confusion.
The cost: Children never see what learning from mistakes looks like. They do not develop the internal habit of reflection. They too will walk into walls with surprise on their faces — because no one ever showed them how to stop and look before moving.
Blaming Everyone. Owning Nothing.
Every problem has a cause — and the cause is always someone else. The government, the relative, the neighbour, fate, bad luck, enemies. The possibility that the common variable across every difficult situation might be Suwarin — has never once been genuinely entertained.
The cost: Children learn that accountability is not a thing adults do. That difficulty means finding someone to blame. They enter the world unable to self-correct, unable to take ownership, unable to grow — and every difficulty in their lives will always, mysteriously, be someone else's fault.
Cannot Read a Room. Cannot Read a Situation.
Suwarin walks into grief and makes it about themselves. Enters a tense situation and escalates it. Says the wrong thing at the wrong moment with astonishing consistency. There is a blindness to the emotional weather of any room that is complete and total.
The cost: Children growing up without this modeled do not develop social and emotional reading skills. They too will be the person who misjudges every room, misreads every situation, and wonders why their relationships keep failing.
Always Gravitates to Low Talk and Small People
In any group, Suwarin finds the loudest, most negative, most gossiping voice and aligns with it. Conspiracy, low gossip, negativity, petty grievances — these are the conversations that get the most attention and the most energy.
The cost: Children who grow up watching this learn that this is how adults engage with the world. Their own inner compass points toward noise rather than signal, toward drama rather than substance. Building anything meaningful becomes almost impossible when your entire orientation is toward what is broken.
No Good Parenting — The Most Consequential Failure
Not present in any meaningful sense. Not emotionally attuned. Not consistent. Not warm. Not a safe base. The children are fed, clothed, housed — and fundamentally unseen. The most important work of parenting — building a secure inner world — is simply not happening.
The cost: This is the core from which all other damage radiates. Every other trait on this list is being transmitted directly into the next generation's nervous systems. Not as genetics. As programming. As their definition of normal.
The Damage is Passed to the Next Generation — Intact
This is the one that should terrify anyone watching from the outside. The children of Suwarin are already displaying the patterns. Not because they are bad children — because they are absorbing their environment with total fidelity, exactly as children's brains are designed to do.
The cost: Without intervention — without one adult who breaks the pattern, names it, models something different — this entire cluster of dysfunction will arrive in the next generation fully formed. Another thirty years of the same damage. Another family fractured from the inside.
Cannot Understand the Importance of Living Together as a Family
The concept that family is something you build together, protect together, sacrifice for — is simply absent. Every interaction is transactional. Every decision is self-serving. The idea that a family is an ecosystem where each person's choices affect everyone else's wellbeing does not register.
The cost: The family unit slowly disintegrates. Children grow up without experiencing what genuine family loyalty and collective care feels like. They do not know how to build it. They do not know what they are missing. And they will struggle their entire adult lives to understand why their own relationships feel hollow.
Sees No Value in Education
Not just formal education — any form of growth, learning, self-improvement, or investment in the future. The orientation is entirely toward the immediate and the superficial. Education — in every form — is treated as either unnecessary or a threat to existing power dynamics in the home.
The cost: This is the ceiling placed on children's futures by someone who never had the ceiling lifted for them. Children who are not surrounded by a culture of learning, growth, and ambition are statistically and measurably disadvantaged for life. The data on this is not subtle. The outcome is not reversible once the window closes.
What We Must Never Forget
Keep This Person Away From Your Family. Full Stop.
This is not cruelty. This is clarity. A person carrying all thirteen of these traits in an active, unexamined form is not a person you can fix with enough patience or love. They are a person who will systematically dismantle the emotional foundation of every child they have sustained access to.
They do not do this with intention. They do it by being exactly who they are — a person whose childhood soil produced these patterns, who never had the awareness or the support to examine and change them, and who is now in a position of influence over children whose soil is still soft.
You are not protecting yourself by creating distance. You are protecting the children — theirs and yours.
The hardest truth about people like Suwarin is this: they are not evil. They are the product of their own unexamined, untended childhood wounds — wounds that were never named, never treated, never transformed. The seed that was planted in them was planted in compromised soil, without adequate water, without the right warmth. What grew was what could grow given those conditions.
But understanding this does not obligate you to stay within range of the thorns. Compassion from a distance is still compassion. Understanding the roots of someone's damage does not mean absorbing it. And protecting children from the transmission of that damage is not a betrayal of family — it is the highest act of family loyalty there is.
One person of this kind — given enough access, enough time, enough influence — can do what no external force can: they can break a family from the inside. Not dramatically. Quietly. Through the daily erosion of safety, dignity, honesty, and hope in the children growing up under their influence. Those children will carry it for decades. Some will carry it forever.
The most expensive thing you will ever give away for free is access to your children's childhood. Once given, you cannot get it back.
It Started With Food.
It Ends With Everything.
I began this reflection in my kitchen. Mutton slow-rendering in a heavy pot. Dal hitting the point where the tempering goes in and the whole apartment fills with something ancient and familiar. Pizza dough resting. Curd setting in the quiet warmth of a covered bowl.
These are not just meals. They are the architecture of memory I am building — for the people I feed, for the children watching, for the future that will be shaped by what they carry in their nervous systems from the tables they ate at.
Why Food is the Most Powerful Memory Trigger — The Final Science
Of all the senses, smell and taste are the only ones that bypass the thalamus — the brain's rational filter — and connect directly to the amygdala and hippocampus: the emotional and memory centres. This means food experiences are stored with raw emotional charge, not rational processing. When that food is encountered again decades later, the entire original experience reactivates — the emotion, the safety, the people, the atmosphere — not as a thought, but as a felt physical reality. In an LLM, training data shapes the model's weights permanently. In a human brain, early sensory and emotional experiences shape neural weights in the same foundational, lasting way. The table you sat at as a child is part of your neural architecture today. You are, in a profound and measurable sense, made of your early meals — not nutritionally, but neurologically.
And so the story comes full circle — from my kitchen, to the brain, to the science of memory, to the three pillars of respect, education, and empathy that every child deserves, to the harsh and unsentimental reality of what happens when one person in a family is carrying unchecked, unexamined damage and spreading it to the next generation.
Suwarin did not choose to become who she is. But the children around her are choosing, without knowing it, to become versions of the same pattern. That is the part we cannot be passive about. That is the part that requires us to be honest even when honesty is uncomfortable.
Cook with intention. Build the table. Protect the childhood. Understand the brain. And know — clearly, without hesitation — who must not sit at that table.
"One bad person in a family is not a character flaw in the story. They are a structural fault line — and the longer you wait to name it, the more of the building falls."
Food connects us to our origins. The brain carries what childhood built. Protect what is being built in the children around you — because they cannot protect it themselves.
अपने विचारों पर ध्यान दें, क्योंकि वे आपके शब्द बनेंगे।
अपने शब्दों पर ध्यान दें, क्योंकि वे आपके कर्म बनेंगे।
अपने कर्मों पर ध्यान दें, क्योंकि वे आपकी आदतें बनेंगी।
अपनी आदतों पर ध्यान दें, क्योंकि वे आपका चरित्र बनेंगी।
अपने चरित्र पर ध्यान दें, क्योंकि वह आपका भाग्य बनेगा।
Watch your thoughts, for they become your words.
Watch your words, for they become your actions.
Watch your actions, for they become your habits.
Watch your habits, for they become your character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.
Here you will find all about Technology, Food, Travel and about our life.
Search This Blog
Blog Archive
- August 2025 (1)
- July 2025 (1)
- February 2025 (1)
- October 2022 (1)
- November 2019 (1)
- June 2019 (1)
- July 2016 (1)
- February 2009 (1)
-
I wrote my first programs in Notepad. Not VS Code, not Sublime — plain old Notepad. No IntelliSense. No Stack Overflow. No internet, actual...
-
COOK THINK LIVE Personal Essay · Neuroscience · Family · Hard Truths I Cook. I Think. I Finally Understand. Wha...
-
Most Doctors are a joke. They will load you up with pills, powders, and syringes… Just because they won’t diagnose the real problem. 8 prob...
AI vs 25 Years in Software
I wrote my first programs in Notepad. Not VS Code, not Sublime — plain old Notepad. No IntelliSense. No Stack Overflow. No internet, actual...
Comments
No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!
Leave a comment — enter your name and message below. The URL field is optional and can be left blank.