I ordered a matcha latte at Hvala on Somerset last week, the way I always do, and took my first sip already knowing I would not love it. The bitterness caught the back of my throat the way it always does. I drank it anyway. I even finished it. But if I am honest, I was not drinking it because I wanted it. I was drinking it because it was the thing to drink.

That is the part I keep thinking about. How often do we choose food not for the taste, but for what ordering it says about us?

Matcha is the easiest example, but it is not the only one. There is a whole category of things we order because they fit a version of ourselves we are trying to build. The matcha drinker is calm, a little refined, the sort of person who has slowed down enough to care about ceremonial grade versus culinary grade. None of that has anything to do with whether the drink tastes good to me. It is about who I get to be while holding the cup.

I notice it most when I order something I genuinely love right after. A kopi from a hawker stall, thick and sweet and uncomplicated. There is no story attached to it. Nobody is impressed. And yet I finish it faster, with more pleasure, than the eight dollar matcha I photographed first. That gap tells me something. When I drink the kopi, I am only drinking. When I drink the matcha, I am performing a small idea of myself.

I do not think this makes anyone a fraud. We have always eaten for reasons beyond hunger. Food has carried meaning for as long as people have shared it. The matcha is just the current shape of something old. We want to belong to a moment. We want our choices to mean something. So we reach for the drink that signals the right things, and we convince ourselves the taste is the point.

What unsettles me is how rarely I stop to ask whether I actually enjoy it. I assumed I liked matcha because I kept ordering it. The ordering became its own evidence. It took sitting alone at a quiet café, with no one to perform for, to notice I was wincing through every sip.

There is more to eating than taste. The things we order reveal what we want to be seen as, what we are reaching toward, what we think we should enjoy. Sometimes the gap between what we order and what we actually like is small. Sometimes it is the whole drink.

I still order matcha now and then. I have stopped pretending it is for the flavor. And on the days I want something I truly like, I let myself want it, without checking whether it fits. That feels closer to honest. It is a small thing, noticing the difference between liking a thing and liking the idea of it. But once you see it, you cannot unsee it, and you start drinking a little more like yourself.