When five or six months old I was taken to Bangladesh by my father for four months or so to be presented to his family, while my mother stayed in Wimbledon, quite traumatised. I’m not sure how I was fed. When I went back to Bangladesh as a boy, I remember being unable to cope with the powdered milk there. Anything mixed with that milk is contaminated for me.

My mother says my strongest curiosity as a little boy was to taste things and this caused great problems – I’d clean stones of mud with my tongue and I’d eat worms. But my earliest actual memory is of sitting in a pram, sticking my tongue out to catch snowflakes and being very excited by their temperature and tastelessness.

I missed school for a year and each day I would hide in the garage, practising dance moves. My parents were horrified when they found out, but then accepted dance was something I had to do. So I studied Kathak under the guru Sri Pratap Pawar. He was a wonderful cook; his speciality was dal soup and he’d say, “As a dancer you need to understand the process of cooking.” It was his way of encouraging me to be patient.

Almost every Friday and Saturday, late into the night, my mother – a music lover – would hold concerts at home, serving lots of food. It was a full house and my sense of space and sanity during those nights was in the lavatory, where I’d write choreographic structures on the wall. Other times I’d practice in the kitchen, stamping and wearing bells around my ankles. It was a nightmare for the neighbours, bless them. I did it on the one-metre section of concrete next to the dish sink. When you have limited space, you focus on the space inside yourself.

I’d been touring the world with Peter Brook’s Mahabharata, being treated like royalty for 18 months. Then I got home, hit normal life and couldn’t tolerate it. I was 15 and my father said, “Come and work evenings in my (Indian) restaurant.” But he hated my waitering – how I’d prance around – and many customers thought it embarrassing or just weird that I’d twirl when clearing their plates. There was a lot of racism – verbal and physical abuse. Licensing laws were different in the 90s. People would rush their beers before the pubs closed and then come and be obnoxious in restaurants where alcohol was on sale for another hour. Aside from my Muslim background, those traumatic experiences – including a cracked skull – are why I’ve never drunk alcohol.

I needed to make money while studying contemporary dance at De Montfort University so worked as a pizza delivery boy, which really put me off pizza. I’d get the rough end of the stick, being sent far out to rough areas where dogs chased me and their owners laughed as I tried to collect money. I shared my kitchen with students who never tidied up. I’d spend all my time cleaning before cooking, then be so exhausted I’d resort to tinned food and boiled eggs.

I never really learned to cook, partly because I returned to live with my parents until I was 31 and married my first wife. It was financially easier and also my mother is a fantastic cook, almost as good as my father; she’s best at chicken biryani and he at lamb biryani. Last year, my second wife and I had our dream marble kitchen built, but we still eat most evenings at my parents, who live on the next road. It was embarrassing recently when we had dinner guests and didn’t know how to operate our steam cooker. My wife and I both like a very tidy and minimalist kitchen and table. We eat separately from the kids. They have their own little table which they use as a plate, making a complete mess, which I can’t handle.

The first time I saw green on my plate was after marrying my second wife (in 2012), who is Japanese. She’d serve me individual vegetables, saying, “You must understand the taste of this broccoli, alone and without sauce.” I became obsessed with green and with sashimi, which I had compared to biting into a live cow. The quality of Japanese food never makes my body work hard to digest it. Nowadays, if I have spicy Indian food I’m sometimes in the loo for ages. But not with oden, teriyaki, ramen, sushi … I have an Indian heart but a Japanese stomach.

For snacks in the dance studio I carry lots of raw nuts, dried fruit and seeds. A while ago, there would also have been a packet of Haribos in my bag, which I’d bulk-buy, keeping 20 packets in the house as a supply. But then the children started eating them and I didn’t want them to have a sweet tooth like me, so I set an example and stopped all my Haribos.

I’ve been researching Prometheus, who gave humankind fire. When he was bound to the mountain and tortured each day by an eagle taking his liver – which would grow back to be taken again the next day – my understanding is that as his body got weaker, more vulnerable, his godly voice got stronger. I abused my own body when young, with high-cholesterol food, but then my body started talking back to me more clearly. It’s a voice many choose to ignore in earlier years, but it gets stronger.

Nowadays, technology is taking over brain thinking, but as hunter-gatherers we relied for millennia on our keen senses of taste and smell to survive. I’ve been investigating robotics for a TV programme and found it disturbing going into robot labs. One of the things technology is taking over is human movement. Whereas the things I loved, say, about sitting by the clay oven and watching the chefs in my father’s restaurant was their instinct, ritual, choreography, and sensory use of smell, taste, time and weight. I’m worried we’ll quickly lose these things.

Akram Khan’s Giselle with the English National Ballet is at Sadler’s Wells, London EC1 from 20-23 September