I want to tell you that I don’t really believe in the magical properties of turmeric, that I was radicalized when I was only a child. Turmeric was prescribed to me weekly at my grandmother’s house in Nairobi — dumped into a pot of sweetened, simmering milk, or smushed with ginger powder and bronze, crystallized gur, the delicious raw sugar paste she bought in bulk and kept in old ice cream tubs with flimsy, warped plastic lids.

There was turmeric for a standard runny nose, the dizzy rush of a fever, the ache of moving away from my best friend. Turmeric for a breakout, a particularly tender, slow-to-heal bruise, the anxieties that kept me awake. Among family, where there was always pressure to talk lightly, and about cheerful things, a cup of hot, sweet turmeric milk pushed across the table seemed like a quiet acknowledgment of my grievances, however tiny, rather than a promise to obliterate them.

There’s plenty of research to support turmeric’s antiseptic and anti-inflammatory properties, but turmeric is neither a miracle drug nor a supernatural phenomenon. It’s a pungent, gently bitter tropical plant, related to ginger, with bulky, bright orange roots that have been used for centuries in kitchens across Asia, including India, where it is known as haldi. Whether you cook with the fresh root or the more manageable powder, turmeric has the capacity to stain your clothes, skin and tongue a neon, nicotine yellow, so that you look as if you’ve been smoking in a very small airless room, uninterrupted, for the last 60 years.

All this makes turmeric an unlikely candidate for a trendy restaurant ingredient, but it has become one anyway, now telegraphing a specific brand of chic well-being, far removed from my Kenyan-Indian family. In the last few months, I had turmeric tonic on ice, and a fizzy turmeric kefir on tap. I sipped a peppery, turmeric-infused milk with my friend Sonia at a coffee shop in Los Angeles, and it cost a whopping $6.