Food Rituals

Originally published February 24, 2025 on Eats by Liwen.

Peeled yogurt lid from Google Images

Cheesecakes go in the freezer. Chipotle bowls remain unmixed so that each spoonful yields an aesthetic cross-section. Empty clam shells are stacked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, threatening to collapse under the lightest touch. When cracking open new wooden chopsticks, I must rub the sticks together with the ferocity of a child shaking a snow globe, and I watch its shavings drift gently through the air. Yogurt lids are immediately licked clean after it is peeled open, teasing its flavor like a movie trailer.

These are a few of the rituals I follow devoutly when it comes to food, rituals that bring me familiarity, peace, and sometimes weird looks. They happen subconsciously, the result of decades of repetition. Food simply does not taste right without them— not that I would know, since forgetting to perform them isn't part of my programming.

But being on autopilot isn't always a good thing. It makes you careless, and that's exactly how I was betrayed by the very rituals that gave me peace.

It was the licking-the-yogurt-lid-clean ritual that shattered my trust.

My tongue swept across the lid of my favorite Noosa Mates Coconut Almond Chocolate yogurt with gleeful excitement. Almost immediately, my excitement was crushed by an electrifyingly sour taste that shot through my tongue. Reflex retracted my tongue, but at the same time, my body wanted this same tongue as far away as possible from its throat. As a result, I gagged and my tongue convulsed, unable to decide what was worse: the taste or the proximity of this substance. This expenditure of energy was futile because I wasn't quick enough.

It had already coated most of my tongue. My disgust built up with every second; I was experiencing a toilet flooding and there was nothing I could do to keep it from seeping into my bathmat. My saliva glands were jolted into first gear, confused by the tartness, but the last thing I wanted was for this substance to spread.

I ran to the sink and threw my head under the faucet. "AAARGH," I gurgled and choked out, trying to push the water away with air— a desperate attempt to make sure that the contaminated water would go down the drain instead of my throat. I clawed at my tongue with my fingers, wishing desperately I could shed off its skin.

Consumed by panic, I didn't notice that my mother had come into the kitchen after hearing my distressed gurgling, spitting, and moaning. She snapped me out of my daze when she muttered, "Look," holding up the lid that I had dropped just minutes earlier. She confirmed what I had feared. On top of the foil laid a lively lawn of blueish-green moss, fuzzy and inviting, a landscape perfect for a science experiment but perhaps not to my personal taste.