Breathing is not always automatic. I learnt that the hard way.
Even now, I can recall the harrowing memory from when I was 4: 3 AM, my chest tightening faster than I could explain. My parents rushing to find the nebuliser.
For most kids, a medicine cabinet is usually a background object. Not for me, though. Ours had a schedule. Steroids. Inhalers. Steam. Nebulisers.
My missed school days were no longer measured by absences, but by how long it took for my lungs to recuperate. This illness exiled me from the very body my childhood self had once taken for granted.
But alongside the treatment, I began to notice smaller rituals. Rituals that made the illness feel a little less consuming. The nushkas (home remedies) were endless: adrak wali chai, honey stirred into turmeric or the steam inhalation my mom transformed into a myriad of herbs. My mother never called it nutritional science, but she knew what to make and when.
When “healthy food” came to my mind, I pictured imported products, expensive superfoods and products in a vocabulary my childhood self could not decode.
But I looked at my own kitchen.
Lentils simmering, ginger crushing, yoghurt culturing. Ingredients so familiar, yet so valuable. The more I googled, the more I realised health shouldn’t be hidden behind imported deliveries. Sometimes, it can begin with what’s already waiting on the kitchen counter.
This realisation became the foundation of Food Thy Medicine for me.
I met my co- founder in the waiting room of a pulmonologist's clinic, where our shared routines of inhalers and nebulisers made the idea feel less like a project but a conversation we had to continue. Thus, I began contributing to this project during the summers after Grades 9 and 10. What began as an interest in food and health became deeply personal: a way to turn years of dependence on doctors, prescriptions and steroids into a desire to understand the body better. As a co-author, I helped build a platform that makes nutrition information practical, not glamorous.
The research for my AI ensured isn’t built for a perfect kitchen, rather the half- empty fridge, rushed day and leftovers that people ask “What can we do with this?” It turns familiar ingredients into realistic meal ideas and our research explains what those ingredients contribute nutritionally.
The point was never to make food mythical but to make useful information feel less daunting and more reliable. It does not replace doctors or medicine: and it shouldn’t. I still take my prescribed medicine. I still live with asthma. But the illness taught me that care doesn’t begin and end at a clinic door and may be found in the ordinary decisions at home. What we cook, what we keep in the fridge and how we care for ourselves between appointments.
I can’t control every flare up. But I can keep asking better questions, and help more people see possibility in the food around them.