Whisking Wisdom: A Journey from Theory to Taste
Swimming Against Tradition
Sonam Samat’s father was keen that his daughter pursue an education and acquire new-age like skills like swimming. Rather than hovering over stovetops, stirring dhals and puffing up rotis like most women in his generation. While Samat relished being dunked in pools, she spent most of her carefree childhood scampering with fun cousins and friends. Only in the 9th or 10th Standard, she turned her attention to books.
Remarkably enough, in an environ where most kids were being coached from the earliest classes, she slayed the entrance exams into competitive Engineering programs. Admitted to her top choice – BITs Pilani – she resolved to make the most of her undergraduate years. In Pilani’s sprawling, wooded greens, she hesitantly signed up for the college swim team. “I’m not a competitive swimmer,” she admitted to selectors.
Those early doubts dissolved when she took to the water. That summer, she dove into pools, no longer gliding for pleasure, but pushing herself lap after lap, building stamina and perfecting her strokes, till she could streak across lengths at an impressive pace. Such moments of shimmery self-making weren’t confined to waters. Taken in equally by lectures and libraries, she enrolled in a dual degree in seemingly disparate topics: Mechanical Engineering and Economics.
Diving Deep into Decisions
Over time, she gravitated towards Behavioral Economics, to the quirky make-up of human decisions. Soaking up books and dense papers in the field, she wanted to plumb its depths. BITs accorded her with an enviable opportunity: a full year of on-the-ground internships. She spent the first six months at the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in Delhi, a storied institution buzzing with economists who had spent decades analyzing policy and poverty.
To round up her experience with an international stint, she shot off letters to about 150 professors across the globe – each one carefully researched, meticulously personalized. “I read your paper on X,” she would begin, “and I believe we could collaborate on Y.” She offered her time as a research assistant, emphasizing that no stipends were required. She needed only the chance to learn.
From her avalanche of enquiries, four professors wrote back. Three were kind rejections, one was an invitation. A professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh said yes. Even today, when students approach Sonam for advice, she observes that they must fan out their enquiries and deepen each request.
Navigating the Choice Lab
At CMU, she lived modestly, worked diligently, and shadowed a brilliant mentor. Twice a week, she met her professor, who assigned research tasks—summarizing papers, scrubbing data, writing insights. The work, rigorous and rewarding, planted seeds for her future. By then, she was applying for doctoral programs in behavioral economics, seeking answers to questions that intrigued her: Why do humans make irrational choices? What drives decisions that defy economic logic? At the end of her term, the professor, recognizing Samat’s promise, offered her a place in the PhD program at Carnegie Mellon.
Dwelling on what sparked her interest in Behavioral Economics, she says she wasn’t particular about the domain where the methods were applied: healthcare, finance et al. She was gripped by the methods themselves, by tools that examine how people make choices. Doing her doctorate under the Public Policy and Management department, she studied the tangled and fraught world of online privacy.
Academic research, she discovered, demanded precision on the smallest scales. Experiments she designed had treatment and control groups, like the randomized controlled trials of medicine, but with nuanced interventions. For one study, participants filled out surveys unknowingly subject to tiny visual cues—images tweaked just so, micro details altered—to measure how decisions faltered or hardened.
Examining the cross-hairs of privacy and targeted ads, she proposed questions that were novel and unsettling. Could an advertisement be craftily tailored to subtly reflect a viewer’s face? Suppose Facebook or Instagram, armed with billions of faces voluntarily shared, tweaked the features of an ad’s model: a flash of the user’s eyes here, a whisper of their jawline there. Would people notice? Would they click?
To test this, Sonam spent late nights creating face morphs, pixel by painstaking pixel. The treatment group received ads eerily carrying traces of their own features; the control group, generic faces. The hypothesis—that familiarity, even subliminal, would nudge action—was tantalizing. It failed. Years of effort and the result was a stubborn p-value. The work never made it to publication.
The world of academia, Samat realized, did not forgive such results. Success was measured in published papers, their conclusions neatly significant. She began to question her path. Teaching, as a TA, had been a source of joy—long sessions spent unraveling problems for others felt fulfilling. But the life of a tenure-track professor, where failure was both routine and disqualifying, felt stifling.
Better than California
Industry felt like a more energizing alternative. Watching friends make their way to tech firms, she decided to follow suit. The application process was merciless. She prepared feverishly for an interview with Facebook, flying from Pittsburgh to California, armed with presentations and talking points. A full day of intense interviews left her hopeful. She looked forward to a summer basking in California’s sunshine, testing out UX research as a career. The rejection was a blow.
But fate, as it often did for Sonam, had a strange way of making U-turns. As the hiring season closed for most tech firms, a delayed opportunity emerged from Google’s Zurich office—from a team studying online privacy, her area of expertise. In Europe, hiring calendars ticked differently; February was not yet too late. In interviews, she felt understood and valued. Google said yes.
Switzerland was better than California, she would later quip. The Google Zurich office welcomed her into its polished halls, and Samat spent a transformative stint doing research with immediate impact. Unlike academia, where findings lingered for years in draft papers, her work could roll out to millions in months. Outside the office, sun rays bounced off jagged peaks, grassy hills and lakes so pristine they looked painted. To top it all, her boyfriend (and now husband) proposed to her in that twinkling DDLJ setting.
From Tech to Changing Tides
On graduating, Facebook beckoned with a full-time offer. She moved to the Bay Area, and spent two-and-a-half industrious years there. Somewhere along the way, life intervened. Pregnant and entangled in the labyrinth of US immigration laws, she was shipped to Vancouver. Facebook parked her in Canada while the American bureaucratic machinery creaked and groaned. She delivered her daughter safely in the US but reflected, as many immigrants do, on the dislocating vicissitudes of visas.
Later, she moved to Google—her intern stomping ground—drawn to its more thoughtful pace. She flourished there: promotions, team growth, and management roles came naturally. She worked in ads and privacy, serendipitously building on her PhD advisor’s interest in a field that would come to define tech’s moral battleground. She experimented, designed, and mentored, taking pride in the progress of those she guided.
But even in a world buttressed by growth charts and upward trends, things began to shift. Google’s first round of layoffs arrived in 2023, a tectonic moment for employees who had presumed themselves secure. Sonam survived, unscathed but unsettled. She started thinking, even obsessively, about her life without the job—the consequences, the opportunities: “What would happen if I got that email?” First came fear, then resolve, and finally, the hint of something radical: what if it wouldn’t be so bad?
The layoffs hadn’t pushed her out, but they had distanced her from her role. She was achieving, thriving even, but no longer tethered to it all in the same way. India loomed on the horizon—she and her husband had always known they would return, though when and why remained nebulous.
Dreaming of A New Career
Plotting to return when their daughter transited to first grade, Sonam wrestled with a simple but profound question: If I could do anything, what would it be?
The answer seemed not to lie in boardrooms or tech cubicles but in the very space that her father had been trying to shield her from: her kitchen. Sonam’s five-year-old daughter, Zaara, had been involved in cooking since she could first grip a spatula. For Samat herself, cooking felt meditative: no screens, no distractions, just the sensory pleasure of creating something tangible and yum. Together, she and Zaara explored tastes, textures and smells. It was not merely cooking, but values imparted during their culinary escapades that struck a chord.
Lessons on sustainability, mindfulness, and carbon footprints were gently passed on —ideas anchored in her concern for the world her daughter would inherit. They discussed local foods, the impact of waste, and why better habits matter. These weren’t weighty theories or doomsday warnings. Rather, they represented kinder, healthier ways to live. Her daughter grasped them intuitively, and Sonam wondered why this wasn’t the norm in every household or school.
While still employed at Google, Sonam had observed cooking classes designed for children. Studios offered kids sugary treats—often made from refined flours—and pretzels for snacks. It was a missed opportunity, she thought. What if kids’ cooking classes emphasized healthy foods and sustainability instead? She sketched out a vision: a kitchen where children could learn to cook wholesome meals, touching, smelling, and playing with food while forging lifelong habits.
Cooking up Connections
In her two remaining months in the U.S., she set out to deepen her knowledge. She volunteered at the Edible Schoolyard Project, a nonprofit that embedded cooking into a middle school’s curriculum in Berkeley, California. Lessons connected food to geography, sustainability, and culture. One day, students might bake pita bread while learning about the Middle East; on another, they might compare the environmental costs of locally sourced eggs versus store-bought ones.
She also interned with Apples to Zucchini Cooking School in Santa Barbara. Where she observed how mobile kitchens brought cooking classes to schools, fostering healthy habits among children of all ages. She reflected on a sobering difference between countries: In America, poverty often dictated unhealthy food choices. By contrast, in India, while some of the poor consumed healthier meals—dal, rice, even millets—affluence ushered processed foods.
Whisking Up Flavourful Futures
Moving to Hyderabad, she embarked on a diploma at a culinary school, determined to hone her own cooking skills.
Founding Flavour Lab, she started drafting lesson plans. Her classes would have structure: a clear learning objective, games, and sensory activities before culminating in a recipe children could cook and take home. One lesson revolves around eating the rainbow—reinforcing the importance of colorful fruits and vegetables. Children would embark on a treasure hunt, assembling vibrant foods into a “rainbow” and then prepare dishes like smoothies or wraps.
Currently building her curriculum, she aims at first to create 12 tested classes, covering specific themes: “For younger children, the focus will be on building curiosity with food through topics like eating the rainbow, understanding nutrients and exploring flavour through all five senses. For older children, we’ll introduce knife and fire safety, the chemistry of fermentation and bread making, and reading food labels.”
The curriculum would evolve with students, but some topics, she says, need repeating annually. “If you teach children about the rainbow diet or the timing of meals from grades one to eight, it will stick.”
Eventually, Sonam envisions a program that can scale nationwide. “Give me a room,” she says, “and I’ll handle everything else.” Her classrooms would not just teach cooking; they would teach food literacy. In the future, she foresees a franchisee or training model where passionate educators would adopt Flavour Lab’s philosophy while tailoring recipes to local contexts.
Sparking Change from Kitchens
For Sonam, food education has layers of meaning. She plans to tackle nutrition, planetary health, and gender equity. “It’s a life skill that all genders must learn,” she asserts, recounting a recent conversation with a well-meaning chef who dismissed boys’ interest in cooking. “At that moment, I knew this was a call worth pursuing.”
In the early days, she plans to work with helper chefs hired on a contract basis. Building a permanent team—perhaps even finding a co-founder—is part of her long-term vision: “I have a decade or more to give to this.”
Beyond nutrition and cooking skills, she seeks to restore dignity to physical work. In a society that valorizes knowledge work, she wants children to understand the value of preparing their own meals—not only for their health but also to connect with the food they consume.
As we speak on Zoom, she draws out a batch of freshly-baked granola cookies from the oven. “I’m in the middle of recipe trials,” she beams. For Samat, it’s behavioral science meeting nutrition and care — and a means to change the planet one cooking lesson at a time.
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