I used to watch Vietnamese-dubbed Hong Kong dramas with my mum. On the hottest Australian summer days, we would hole up in her bedroom, the only room with an air conditioner, and binge for hours and hours on TV. Full of predictable plots and the same roulette of too-beautiful actors, it was the great indulgence of my childhood, only rivalled by books. With each series spanning over about 30 hours, it was easy to live in their worlds.

My entry into Hong Kong drama was not only through my imagination, but also through my stomach. Every time a character ate instant noodles, which happened a lot, I would become hungry for instant noodles. Instant noodles were glamorous because the beautiful people ate it on screen and were even more irresistible because as a kid it was only an occasional treat. Sometimes when the characters settled down for instant ramen, my mum would look at me conspiratorially and head to the pantry. As the Hong Kong actors worked late, made friends and fell in love over instant noodles, so we shared their lives through food.

Years later, living alone in Washington, D.C., I read a wonderful collection of food essays from The New York Times called “Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table.” With the premise that you can capture a person through the way that they eat, these essays weave together perfect moments of eating, writing and living. The descriptions of food and of eating were so vital — and what is more vital than eating? — that I felt like I had to eat the food to properly understand the stories. One night, after reading a short story set at a bean factory, I decided to cook black beans for the first time.

I simmered the beans with garlic and onion. Then, impatient that my experiment was taking so long, I cranked up the heat. When I lifted the lid after 20 minutes, a stream of smoke escaped the pot and filled up the room. The smokiness beautifully complemented the earthy taste of the beans and the tang of garlic. I even found that the singed crispiness at the edges contrasted nicely with the bean’s tender belly. I poured the beans over chorizo-infused rice and topped it with fresh tomatoes. Reading could never be the same again.

With this success, I embarked on a summer project: Eat What You Read. Perhaps I couldn’t always see what the characters saw but I could eat what they ate. As a lover of puns, I also couldn’t wait to tell my friends that I was truly digesting what I read. Altogether, it was unnecessary and funny enough to sound like a lot of fun.

The first sentence of García Márquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera” reads, “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love”. How incredible that the novel begins with such a clear food-literature connection. Easy, I thought. I bought a bag of raw almonds. But they didn’t really smell of anything in particular, least of all unrequited love. A failed trial.

Luckily, the characters soon became obsessed with eggplant and so did I. Eggplant dishes kept popping up throughout the book, but never so explicitly connected with a theme like with almonds. Humbled, I decided to cook eggplant with no expectations. Rubbed with olive oil and salt, stir-fried and served with brown rice, spicy couscous or tacos and mozzarella, the eggplant was my vegetable of choice for two weeks. At first, raw eggplant is taut, tough and green, and seems to promise nothing more than rubber. But on the pan, it softens and melts, gathering savor almost like meat and finally balanced out by the delicate bitterness of its skin. Over 400-odd pages of García Márquez, eggplant became the symbol of old love: the humbling, patient and sometimes-boring love of Fermina Daza and Dr. Urbino’s 50-year marriage.

Against the richness of eggplant, the scent-of-almond love was feeble as fantasy, the fantasy that a food would smell as it tastes, or vice versa. Fermina Daza’s other suitor sent her letters enclosed with gardenias and smelt forests of gardenias whenever she passed by. He watched her sit beneath an almond tree and filled his head with its smell. But the scent of a flower is subtle and barely sweet. Just so, the scent of bitter almonds is barely real, only there if you imagine it to be — like love when it is unrequited.

Next came Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.” It is a tough memoir about growing up in a poor, black family in the segregated South of the U.S. and being raped at the age of eight. Hard-pressed for money, Angelou's suppers consisted mostly of canned food. Yet there is a tenderness about the scene as she sits with her brother, grandmother and handicapped uncle, sharing between them canned sardines and crackers.

On the Friday night of Washington, D.C.’s summer Restaurant Week, I picked up a can of sardines for dinner. Self-consciously, I asked the drug store employee why it checked out at 1.99 when it was marked 99 cents on the shelf. She fixed the price for me and I went home to dine on 99-cent sardines with leftover naan. It was a familiar dish, the regular lunch fare of my high school days. However, I was informed this summer that polite people do not eat canned fish in the company of others. So I ate alone and quickly fantasized about the life partner that would someday eat canned fish with me on a Friday evening.

Maya Angelou followed up with dessert: canned pineapple, the unfulfilled dream of her childhood.

She wrote, “Although the syrupy golden rings sat in their exotic cans on our shelves year round, we only tasted them during Christmas … I dreamt of the days when I would be grown and able to buy a whole carton for myself alone”.

I recognised the dream in myself — not for pineapple, but for canned peaches. It seemed to me the most luxurious dessert my mum ever served: a bowlful of canned peaches and ice cubes. Sometimes at night I snuck back to the kitchen for one more slice, and felt delirious with its perfection — such that I can’t even begin to describe the taste in words. It never occurred to me that I could eat a whole can of peaches on my own, and now Angelou had given me the invitation.

At the end of the summer, I thought about the different ways I could frame this experience. I thought about Susan Sontag’s erotics of art, bringing the sensuality back into art interpretation. But maybe I shouldn’t conceptualize or intellectualize the story. What if an essay ended just by saying, “it was a good time.” Why is it necessary to package our time and our instincts into rational goals? As I read and ate, my peers skimmed political magazines and non-fictions on U.S. history, readying conversation pieces for networking opportunities — justifying our time. We scrape surfaces and scroll newsfeeds, not stopping to smell the flowers or taste the eggplant.

Taste does not need to be justified. It is as simple as liking the taste of eggplant — liking, or not liking eggplant needs no justification. It is an inscrutable and honest marker of our instinct. Where does the liking come from? After semesters of the Socratic method, I wanted to shout from the rooftops: I like eggplant because I like eggplant because I like eggplant because I like eggplant.

Even as we are trained in college to develop arguments, craft topic sentences and navigate academic theories, we still have to remember our gut. To do things without a traceable logic — recite Dr. Seuss to the Corniche at night, create a vigorous marketing campaign for a nonexistent perfume or hide away with a can of peaches. Where else to start but at the humble kitchen, where neither Marxism nor constructivism are as reliable as your tongue. Sometimes only a sense as simple as taste can tell you the truth.