I do not remember every meal I have eaten.

That probably sounds strange coming from someone who spends a lot of time eating, talking about food, and telling people where I have been. But most meals eventually become a blur. What stays are the ones where something else happened around the table.

A conversation that went longer than expected. Someone laughing at something completely unrelated to the food. A difficult day that felt slightly easier after sitting down for an hour.

I realised this one evening at Inspirasi Stall at Bedok Interchange Hawker Centre, eating their mee rubus. I was not there for a special occasion. I was just hungry and looking for something familiar.

Around me, people were having their own dinners, some alone, some with family for a pot of fish head steamboat, some clearly in the middle of an everyday routine.

There was nothing particularly memorable about the moment.

And yet, I remember it.

Maybe that is why I have become less convinced that taste is the only thing that makes a meal memorable. We often talk about food as though the dish exists separately from everything happening around it. We describe what we ate, how it tasted, and whether we enjoyed it.

But we rarely talk about what was happening in our lives when we ate it.

A bowl of noodles can become associated with a difficult week. A café can remind you of someone you no longer see. A restaurant you once visited with friends can feel completely different when you return alone.

As a food influencer, I sometimes catch myself trying to remember the details that are easiest to document. What did I order? What was the signature dish? What stood out?

Those things matter when we are sharing a food experience. But they are not necessarily what we carry with us.

Sometimes, the meal is simply the backdrop.

What stays is the person sitting across from you. The conversation you were having. The news you had just received. The feeling you had when you walked through the door compared to when you left.

That is something food reviews cannot really capture.

And perhaps that is why some of the meals I remember most are not the ones that would make the most impressive content. They are ordinary meals that happened at a particular point in my life and quietly became attached to it.

We eat every day, so it is easy to think the food is what we are supposed to remember.

But maybe the meal is only one part of the memory.

Sometimes, what happened around it is the part that stays.