Eating Ancestrally Helped Me Reclaim My Asian Roots

For many Asian Americans, food is at once a site of deep joy and connection and an object that articulates a particular kind of un-belonging, a deviance of flavor, smell, and sight under Western standards of “normal” or “good.” This so-called deviance has been crafted for us by colonial and imperial storytelling that renders our food, and by extension, us, as Other.

Imperialists and colonizers alike have storied Asian food as strange, revolting, and/or impure, limiting narratives that have persisted through generations of settler colonialism, extractivism, and Western military domination. 

As Soleil Ho argues in her evergreen article “Craving the Other,” many of us have internalized these stories—especially when the cultural rejection of our foodways is folded into our experiences of racialization—and are also actively refusing them, given the second and third generations’ desire to form new attachments to tastes, traditions, and stories that have been forgotten on our behalf.

For me, food has been my strongest anchor in recuperating ancestral relationships in diaspora. A mixed white and South Asian Sikh who is regularly consumed as white, I am the product of my mother’s lineage of white settlers on the Dakota lands and waters of Mni Sota Makoce (called Minnesota) and a Punjabi Sikh settler who moved to the same unceded lands.

I only learned about my Indianness when my father and I visited our family farm during childhood Christmas breaks. I do not speak Hindi or Punjabi because it was not spoken to me at home, and I only attended gurdwara in the United States in elementary school. These were not my choices, but they acutely impact how I have been perceived by family, community, and everyone else for my entire life.

That said, I, like many children raised in an even obliquely Sikh household, knew that my people were fighters—had been forced by circumstance to become not just warriors, but committed protectors of all who face oppression. Our holidays celebrate the martyrdom of children and elders who submitted to death rather than convert to Islam under Mughal rule, gurus who risked their lives to free people of other faiths they had been imprisoned with, and so on.

Sikhs celebrate our love for our people and all people—we are called upon to “see the whole human race as one”—in shared prayer and contemplation, which is inevitably followed by dancing and eating and joy. There is no Sikh history without food and no food without our history.

Food is a vehicle through which Asians in diaspora cannot just imagine, but perhaps embody and emulate, ancestral revolutionary traditions for our own times. More, in thinking with food, we can recuperate ways of knowing otherwise—of seeing ourselves in futures we have legally, socially, discursively, or materially been excluded from—that help us understand historical and ongoing modes of community building and collaborative survival across Asian America.

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As soon as I was conscious of the world around me, I knew that my self—my essential, uncategorizable mixed-ness—would always be understood as an aberration or something to be “fixed” by Punjabis and Sikhs, white folks, and, ultimately, everyone else.

My families reinforced this in their own ways and, while not malicious, the lesson of my childhood was that I couldn’t please anyone given my inability to perform the idealized traits of both identities.

There were two people who never made me feel like a failure, an aberration,

or a complication to be dealt with, though: my paternal grandparents. My dadaji, or paternal grandfather, told anyone who would listen how I taught him English because once I learned to speak, I never stopped. This was not true, but became a running joke for as long as he remembered my name and face. My dadiji—paternal grandmother—never learned English, but took great pride in watching me trace my fingers across new words in picture books, smiling at my excitement rather than lamenting my lack of language. 

In the absence of shared words, she brought me into our family and culture by teaching me about food. Every year, my father and I visited our family farm bordering Nepal. Although my grandparents were both born in Punjab, they had fled home in their teens during the violence of Partition, ending up a subcontinent’s breadth away from loved ones, support structures, and the land their families had cultivated for generations.

As a child, I didn’t understand what Partition, the British Raj, or refugeeism were; all I knew was that my grandparents had made a lovely life for their five children by tending the land. 

This land, former jungle sold by the Indian state to refugees displaced by colonizers who drew borders where they saw fit, was a haven for my 18-year-old dadaji, dadiji a few years later, their children, and my cousins and me, the third generation to think of “the farm” as a second home. A small revolution, perhaps, but isn’t survival under impossible conditions always revolutionary?

My childhood trips to the farm always centered around the kitchen, where my dadiji would let me observe as she made meals. One of my earliest memories is of her showing me how to use a thumbnail to shimmy peas from their pods. I laughed as the fruit she had so lovingly tended in her kitchen garden pinged into a steel bowl, then grew frustrated at my own inability to wield my much smaller, less dexterous fingers with nearly the same precision.

She would bring me into the kitchen, motioning to me to sit on a braided stool so I could watch as she added oil to a pan for tadka (spices tempered in oil) before dumping its contents into a freshly pressure-cooked vat of dal. The way she could slice peppers and carrots with a paring knife—drawing the blade through the vegetable and stopping it with her thumb—without cutting herself amazed me.

I distinctly remember my awe at my grandmother’s pantry, which was stacked with shelves of pickle, jaggery, and other dried goods neatly nestled in a broken refrigerator someone had converted into extra storage space. On Christmas—a holiday that wasn’t a part of the Sikh calendar but had crept into our family’s own traditions—she would use an ancient-yet-perseverant toaster oven to make a plain yellow cake, which will persist in my mind as the best dessert I’ve ever had.

My dadiji passed when I was 12. She was drinking cha in her bedroom

when she had a massive heart attack brought on by hereditary heart issues. I was not allowed to go with my father to her final rites. Twenty-odd years later, I still miss her every day.

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Punjab, the land my paternal family is from, is called such because it historically was home to five rivers: the Beas, Satluj, Ravi, Chenab, and Jhelum. Before Partition, these rivers made the land perfect for growing, so much so that the region is often still referred to as “India’s breadbasket.”

On March 24, 2020, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi announced that in 14 hours, the whole country would go into COVID-19 lockdown. As the markets for rural industries like agriculture became more tenuous in the global COVID-19 economy, hundreds of thousands of people were forced out of work, leaving urban centers for homes several days’ walk away. Most of the places where they would be forced to recuperate a stable life relied on agriculture. 

During the 21-day lockdown that followed, Modi passed three laws that undid farmers’ long-standing access to price assurance, or a minimum fixed price for their yield. For a decade, India’s farmers were living under constant threat of suicide. Their labor and land have been so undervalued on the market and so threatened by environmental change that the practitioners of the foundational livelihood of 70 percent of the nation’s rural population did not know whether it was possible to stay alive under crushing debt.

The new farm laws doubled down on these ongoing and compounding vulnerabilities, essentially telling farmers that while their livelihoods were the backbone of the country and heavily contributed to feeding the world’s people, they should not expect to be able to live off that work. Should not hope to make life from the land they had fought so hard to keep solvent. Should not expect to make life at all.

Modi was hoping to bring more foreign investors and private money into

the agricultural sector, and he was willing to sacrifice the labor that had made the sector a global force to begin with. This guaranteed vulnerability— institutionalized expendability, in the eyes of most farmers—sent shock waves across all of the nation’s agricultural regions. 

Punjab, the so-called breadbasket of India, began mobilizing. I knew that many Punjabis and Sikhs would be impacted, both in the country and across the diaspora. Impacted because they could not make a living in the country. Impacted because they were too far away to do anything. Impacted because our marrow has traces of Punjab in it, and the ache for life and land is foundational, no matter how many borders or generations removed we are.

The movement now known as the Farmers’ Protest began among Sikh farmers in Punjab and solidified in Delhi, where Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jain, and many other farmers from all over the country converged to block roadways into the capital city. 

As the farmers, so many of whom looked like my grandparents, aunties, and cousins, pressured the government to repeal laws that ultimately underwrote Modi’s agenda of religious purity, they made a temporary home in the city streets.

At every blockade—called a “morcha” by the protestors, which in British English translates to “a hostile demonstration against the government”—protestors weatherized tractor trailers to sleep in, built massive communal kitchens and lavatories, and erected free stores, libraries, and schools for elders and youth alike.

When the protesting farmers were beaten with lathis and shot with water cannons on Republic Day, farmers established medical clinics, patched up their wounded, and refused to leave. When Delhi police installed barbed-wire walls and tire-puncturing spikes around them, farmers nailed down the spikes with shoe heels and planted flowers and herbs in their stead, an act of refusal that made me cry.

We will grow anywhere, they said. Will bloom in response to your barbed wire. Your open-air prison cannot contain our spirit. We will prevail because we are the revolution.

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The COVID-19 lockdown brought me back to my kitchen. While I made all of the requisite COVID foods—my sourdough starter never really matured—I craved the dishes my dadiji made for my cousins and me when we were ill as children, the dishes that brought our family together at the table, and the ones that felt like a celebration. Each time I remembered and tried to replicate my family’s recipes, I lit a candle in the kitchen and on my altar. This was both an invitation and an ask: here, let’s make something together and please, help me remember how it should taste.

When the Farmers’ Protest began, I knew that I had to learn more about my community’s histories and our presents. While I continue to negotiate my own and others’ complicated relationship with my identities, in 2020 it became clear to me that because I am descended of the Punjab, I am of every farming family who remade their lives at the morcha. I knew it was important that I understand and value what they are risking their lives for.

While the protestors ached to return to their already emaciated land, I tried to understand the Sikh precepts that kept them away from home for more than a year. Lighting a candle, I pulled out books that I had borrowed from but never returned to my father, reading about our history at my altar with my ancestors. 

Then, I would cook. Adding onion, garlic, ginger, and tomato to my pressure cooker before choosing what dal or sabji to add to what a friend called “Punjabi mirepoix,” I stirred the texts and what came through at my altar into every step of my meal, testing out Punjabi words in the safety of my home, my cat Loui the only witness to my linguistic incompetence.

As I brought our precepts and histories into conversation with our foodways, I was reminded that  responding to injustice is Sikhs’ duty: to see someone in distress and do nothing is to fly in the face of every teaching our gurus had cultivated across ten generations and a myriad of revolutions.

I would put ingredients or a bite of the finished product on my altar. A way to share, remember, and create across time, space, and tangibility. We all ate well. We ate together.

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Tens of thousands of suicides, draught, erratic weather, and so much else have created so much distress. But living communally, moving toward a common cause, making the world see their brilliance and values, also made the morcha joyful. 

Clip after clip on social media showed protestors feeding each other and their neighbors, dancing bhangra, and reading side by side quietly. Instagram posts showed elders teaching math to local children who couldn’t attend school, youth leading elders in daily exercise, and everyone sharing in the burdens of cooking, washing, and surviving, together. 

The amount of love present in these multigenerational spaces, which brought organizers for labor, against caste and religious violence, and growers together, was overwhelming, palpable even from my far remove in North America.

When, after a year of occupying Delhi’s streets, the farmers prevailed and the laws were rescinded, knots I didn’t realize had formed across my shoulders and down my thighs slowly released. For a week, tractors rolling back into Punjab were greeted by crowds of people dancing, singing, and showering their kin with marigolds and sweets. It wasn’t, as some might say, a victory for the tenacious people who had endured heat, monsoon, and near-freezing to keep their livelihoods. No, these days and weeks were celebrations of a collective future that had become more possible because of the protestors’ tenacity. They were celebrations of the few who gave so much for the many—the many families, critters, seeds, and soils who did and still have so much to lose.

They were a promise of survival, and a refusal to accept things as they are. 

They were also a promise to return if the government reneged on its agreements. 

To return if harm continues to be done to the land, people, water, and animals.

To refuse to be cowed in the face of violence today, tomorrow. 

To make resistance a daily act, one seed, one bite at a time.

To reverberate from the other side. To make revolution inevitable.

This excerpt, adapted from Eating More Asian America: A Food Studies Reader edited by Robert Ji-Song Ku, Martin F. Manalansan, and Anita Mannur (New York University, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.