• Should Indians stop having kitchens and eat out daily. A mental health professional and a culturally tuned Bharatiya evaluates the connection between food, home cooking, family, and impact on mental health.

A recent interaction on LinkedIn has been an inspiration for this article. A well-known businessman made an excited post on Singapore’s restaurant chains, wondering what could be done for restaurant business to ‘thrive’ in India (comparable to western standards). He added that many, known to him in Singapore, did not cook or had no kitchens in their homes owing to the flourishing variety of restaurants. Some responses to this post were skeptical, critical and protested the idea of restaurants as a ‘replacement’ for home kitchens (Baptist, 2025). 4 Others were lukewarm. But none voiced a clear, positive support.

The protests, quite thoughtfully worded, demonstrated conscious recognition and support for Indian home kitchens, something that lies at the core of Indianness, amongst many other things. These responses also echoed the relearning and reclaiming of the Indian Knowledge Systems, which has seen an upsurge during the last decade.

It’s fascinating how the Indian household kitchen remains a central, inseparable part of life. It holds the status of a favourite child—so loved that it rarely sees restaurants as competition, keeping the restaurant market at a nascent and slowly evolving stage (Yogesh Upadhyay, 2009). 2

Despite increasing urbanization and globalization that challenges their ‘home-made food’ palate and despite the compromised incidence of home-cooking (Kumar GS, 2022), 1 Indians continue to cherish the home kitchen. International exposure and travel have expanded culinary tastes, but rather than replacing traditional practices, this diversity has enriched them. With social media, YouTube, and easy inter-state travel, Indians eagerly experiment beyond regional boundaries – north Indian homes prepare dosas, while malai paneer is relished in the south. From Hilsa in Bengal to mangoes from Konkan, every corner of India contributes to a collective, ever-unfolding range of food that is rooted, expansive, and deeply personal.

India is not just vibrant and diverse. It is that never-ending, unfolding and unraveling story of the Kathasaritasagar (even in its eating traditions) that will never cease to thrill, intrigue, satiate and endure. Each time one feels that one has seen it all, another world of innumerable possibilities start revealing itself. It is not possible for one human being to taste every recipe, within every cuisine, from every part of India, within one lifetime.

This deep-rootedness isn’t merely habit—it stems from civilizational memory and cultural sanskaras encoded over generations. Food in India isn’t just comfort; it’s well-being. 

The concepts of saatvik, rajasik, and tamasik foods reflect a spiritual science of balance and health that is brought down to daily processes through the system of Ayurveda. The body constitutes of Kapha, vaata and pitta, and food is linked to well-being, balance and also to personality qualities and traits (Srinivas, 2011).3

The Indian home kitchen, thus, is more than functional – it’s a living legacy. It supports mental health through coherence, ritual, and belonging. Cooking is an act of care. Eating together reinforces relationships. The ritual prayers, seasonal eating, feeding animals, etc., reflect harmony with nature and self.

Lack of apparent illness does not define health. Health is a multi-dimensional construct of well-being that involves physical, psychological, intellectual, social, emotional and financial fitness.  All these dimensions are studied in relation to others. They are interdependent, create a united front for resilience and can sometimes compensate for a lack in one dimension to maintain the overall health of the human being.

Intriguingly enough, the meticulous processes involved with the Indian style of cooking apply to all dimensions of health.

The most obvious are the physical and financial benefits of home-cooked meals. But Indian recipes are far from being ad hoc and functional – they are a legacy, carried through generations. Like many other verticals of Indian civilization, the home kitchen and the Indian food science is a thoroughly evolved system that follows the footsteps of the ancient Indian spiritual science. The spiritual functions of human life are distilled into an elegant design that incorporates routines and rituals related to food – sourcing, storing, cleaning, preparing, serving, and discarding.

Within the health realm, mental health is difficult to understand compared to its physical and financial counterparts. It is much more subtle and it’s lack can be observed only in retrospect, not quite in the making. Subtle aspects of how something is done or carried out has deep impact on psychological atmosphere – e.g. ‘how’ of communication, ‘how’ of nurture, ‘how’ of parenting. The list can go on to include almost every process of human to human and human to nature interactions.

The parts of the Indian food science system that support mental health need a special reference here because they root themselves in the ‘how’ of different processes related to food and eating. They, therefore, mark the pinnacle of sophistication of a thoroughly developed science, transforming itself into art.

1. Cooking and eating are family and social activities in India. It is an experience for all five senses, the soul and the spirit, that is shared with other human beings. There is personal attention and day-to-day connectivity with each other.

2. A prayer before eating generates reverence, gratitude and a recognition of the feeding process as the yadnya – the jathar agni that is satisfied by the aahuti of food.

3. Cooking, an act of care and warmth towards loved ones, enhances one’s own well-being and brings a sense of fulfilment. 

4. Serving is considered to be a noble act. Manners, etiquettes, ways of hospitality, aesthetics in laying a table, the use of home-made condiments like ghee, pickles, chutneys while serving someone are the finer aspects of culinary habits that transform the coarse act of eating into an art-form, thus providing a higher purpose to everything.

5. Waiting on the person who is having a meal is a special gesture encoded into the Indian food sciences. It is well-known that food consumed with love, joy, togetherness and peace is healing to the body and mind. Waiting on someone or eating together enhances relationships. It is the time when sweet nothings are shared, the day is reviewed, where one gets to unwind and where people can let go and take a breath.

6. The Indian food habits are woven with complexity and elegance with changing seasons, climate, and temperature. They are aligned with geography and history through religious rituals and festivals. This elegant model improves coherence and rootedness in space and time.

7. Many food rituals also extend to animals, birds, forests, mountains, rivers, and oceans. This ensures a constant and conscious relation between the microcosm and the macrocosm.

This sophisticated system, that holds such immense promise to support mental health, requires conscious attention. When we ignore these practices or follow them without understanding, we lose their essence. Conscious participation is essential. Without it, tradition either becomes irrelevant or misused.

In today’s changing and pluralistic world which involves the perennial chaos of identity, holding space for this wisdom requires effort, reverence, and intelligent adaptation. Only then can we truly unlock the healing potential of the Indian kitchen – for both body and mind.

The Indian food science is one of the innumerable verticals of the Bharatiya Dhanyana systems. They are the 14 Vidyas (knowledge systems) and the 64 Kalas (art forms), so finely woven into each other that they completely form one unified lifestyle.

India does not have history, it has Itihaasa (that’s how it happened) and a civilization that is Santana (eternal and dynamic). Nothing here is linear. What goes, comes back – for review and revival. There is no beginning and no end. 

There is only transformation and transcendence. Every ad hoc experiment over time has been tried, tested, repeated, some of it rejected and some of it accepted – like a good scientific process. A well-distilled methodology thus formed, is no more just information. It is Dnyana!

Knowledge travels through time, transmits through generations in spirals, reinvents itself and rises to its better and deeper form. This eternal process of seeking and improving through millennia has created cohesiveness, unity and transformation of knowledge within all verticals of dnyana, the home sciences being one of them.

The Sanatana quality can be observed in the thick weaving of all these verticals – philosophy, education, the classical arts, the stories and the itihasas, healing and ayurvedic medicines, metallurgy, agriculture, architecture, food science, animal husbandry, weaving and the textile arts, law and the sciences, cosmology, astronomy and astrology, etc. – depicting the endless wisdom that has already been discovered through ages, validating the phrase ‘ekam sat vipra, bahudha vadanti.’

These sophisticated civilizational roots, deeply embedded into our cultural and civilizational memory have carried us through various invasions, changes in epochs and have stood the test of time. They have enough to provide us with direction and wisdom at every crossroad of life – provided we look in the right direction. 

Today, India faces serious issues that point towards concerns with mental health with growing incidence of mental illnesses, yet being inflicted with inferiority complex, lack of self-regulation and succumbing to anxiety and depression. To develop a better mental health paradigm that is truly Indian, three pillars are essential –

1. A purposeful and reverence-filled revisiting of our ancient wisdom.

2. An intelligent adaptation to modern living without disturbing the elegantly developed matrix of lifestyle designs.

3. Preserving spiritual functionality of the knowledge systems.

This process has already begun. We need to keep the flame burning and adding more and more people to the great Yadnya of the modern times. Discovering the beauty of the Indian home kitchen is one, but a major step towards better mental health.

References

1. Kumar GS, K. M. (2022, March 29). Evolving Food Choices Among the Urban Indian Middle-CLass: A Qualitative Study. Frontiers in Nutrition, 9(March 2022), 1 - 12.

        2. Yogesh Upadhyay, S. K. (2009). COnsumers Preferences TowardsRestaurants: Examining Their Homogenity, in AP. Asia-Pacific Advances in Consumer Research, 8, 76-82.

       3. Srinivas, T. (2011). Exploring Indian Culture Through Food. Food, Culture, and Asia, 16, 38-41.

4. Baptist, R. (2025). www.linkedin.com. Retrieved from here  

Author is a Mumbai based Psychotherapist. Visit her site and AparaIndia