Anthropology of Leftovers: What Our Homes Reveal When Everyone Sleeps
Writing
Mahathy Mohan
At night, when the house finally lets out a weary exhale, the kitchen lies awake. The refrigerator hums like a patient deity. The sink gleams with the faint arrogance of things that have survived the day. This is when I begin my fieldwork, when the home’s ruins are most willing to speak. Anthropologists usually study civilisations in decline, but I’ve always suspected that homes decay first. Leftovers are simply the artefacts that admit this.
1. The Half-Cut Onion
It lies on the chopping board, wrapped in drying pink layers, shrivelled at the edges yet somehow defiant. It belonged to my mother earlier that afternoon. She had sliced it mid-sentence, not because the story had reached its end, but because someone had called out to her from another room.
Mother has a habit of abandoning her own narrative at the slightest interruption. The onion carries that pause, the almost-tears she blinked back, the sharpness she softened for others. It is a cross-section of a woman bisected but never fully revealed, her inner world exposed yet still out of reach.
2. The Stale Roti
Folded into itself like a secret kept too long, this one is my father’s. He never finishes the last roti. He says it’s out of modesty, but I suspect it’s an apology he doesn’t know how to phrase, just in case someone gets hungry later.
Once, when I was eight, I tried to finish the roti he had left behind. He stopped me gently and said, “Let it be. Something should remain.”
I didn’t understand then. I wanted to ask why, but the taste of that moment stayed. It was a mixture of restraint and worry. As if finishing the roti would erase some kind of fragile equilibrium he relied on.
And so I never asked.
Objects abandoned out of habit carry the topography of a person. In this one, I taste a love that is cautious. Perfectly round but wrinkled and hardened, warm at the centre but afraid to spill over.
3. The Abandoned Cup of Chai
A thin film settles on top, the kind that forms only when tea has waited too long. This one is mine. I leave chai everywhere. On the bookshelf, beside the laundry basket, on the balcony railing.
Every cup is a fossil of my drifting attention.
A sediment of half-done thoughts.
I’ve been like this for years; leaving little pieces of myself behind in repeated patterns.
Evidence that I live in spirals, not straight lines. If an archaeologist excavated my cups, their notes might read: “Subject displays romantic hesitation; rarely completes what they desire.” And they wouldn’t be wrong.
4. The Fruit Going Soft in the Basket
Not quite spoiled, not quite edible. Transitional fruits remind me of my brother. Always becoming, never arriving.
The bananas speckle into constellations. The apples bruise where he tests them for sweetness. He examines each piece the way he examines his life; picking it up, weighing it, setting it back because the decision feels too final.
He always holds fruit the way he navigates the world: carefully, afraid he might leave a mark.
When we were teenagers, he once left a perfectly ripe mango untouched for days. “What if I eat it too soon?” he said. “What if I regret it the moment it’s gone?”
We all pretend not to notice.
He said it jokingly, but the fruit understood him better than any of us.
So the fruit waits.
Concept Note
When I first approached the theme Food for Thought, I found myself thinking not of meals but of what remains once the performance of eating is over. Every home has its rituals around food (recipes, celebrations, shared plates), but I was drawn instead to the quiet afterlife of those rituals: the half-cut onion drying at the edges, the stale roti folded on itself, the cup of chai forgotten mid-thought. These are not the dishes we proudly pass down, photograph, or even remember. These are the scraps, the hesitations, the pauses in a family’s vocabulary.
If eating is an act of taking the world into ourselves, then leftovers are what we refuse to fully absorb. They are what linger, undecided, between forgetting and remembering. In that sense, leftovers became my archive. They are the residue of decisions, emotions, and absences that rarely make it to the dinner table conversation. Each leftover in the piece functions like a soft ethnography of my home. Rooted in the lived realities of my family, they are evidence of the ways love, worry, restraint, and longing take shape not in grand gestures, but in what we leave behind when we think no one is watching.
If food is a living archive, then leftovers are the footnotes. The parts we don’t intend to preserve but do anyway. They map the invisible labour of the people we live with, the stories interrupted, the appetites subdued, the desires postponed. They mark belonging not through inheritance but through habit - the leftover rice, the unwashed utensils, the slow rot of fruit that wait for a decision that never arrives.
What struck me as I wrote was how much of family life is encoded in these small, unglamorous remnants. They remember the things we forget or choose not to speak about: the arguments that simmer under the surface, the affection expressed through keeping the “last piece,” the personal tendencies we reveal unintentionally, like the drift of attention, the fear of making a mark, the hope that someone else will understand our silence.
This piece, then, is my attempt to read the home the way an anthropologist might read a dig site - gently, attentively, through what is left behind. The excavations felt almost mutual. What I uncovered seemed to surface on its own, as if meeting me halfway. In the quiet hours of the night, the kitchen becomes honest in a way we rarely allow ourselves to be. And in those moments, food becomes more than sustenance or symbol; it becomes a mirror.
Through this lens, Food for Thought is not just about what nourishes us, but about what endures after nourishment. Not just about what we consume, but about what lingers, what softens, what cools, what waits.
Leftovers are the tender contradictions of family life: unwanted yet cared for, ignored yet remembered, abandoned yet revealing. They are the quiet reminders that homes, like people, speak most truthfully in the moments between performances.
This piece is simply my attempt to listen.
Artist Bio
Mahathy Mohan is a 21-year-old liberal arts and humanities student who writes because she genuinely cannot imagine doing anything else. With headphones usually blasting music at medically questionable volumes, she oscillates between poetry, prose, and research. Her work is personal and political, absurd and theoretical, humorous and passionate. She can’t go long without snorting at her own joke. Both her own worst critic and occasionally yours, she tries her best, despite the persistent RBF, to be good. Writing is not a hobby for her; it is a purpose, essential to her survival. She has an appreciation for art and hopes to connect people with hers.