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Ever wondered what a man of peace eats? In the case of the great Mahatma, apparently nothing much at all.
A study of his autobiography, and Arundhati Bhanot’s Food for the Soul, reveals Mohandas K. Gandhi as a man fastidious about his food. His aim in terms of dietetics appears to mainly concern the overcoming of appetite while maintaining adequate nutritional intake.
We can learn a lot from Ghandi who focused on food that did not travel far. Just like his homespun, much of his food sources too are grown at his abode.
He was influenced by authors on vegetarianism who surmised that higher beings should protect the lower, and man should eat to live and not vice versa (Il ne fait mange pour le vivre mais vivre pour le mange – Moliere).
With experimenting, for example abstinence from sweets and condiments, he realised that taste was indeed mind rather than matter of the tongue. His tests were varied indeed, ranging from living on only bread and fruit, or giving up starchy fruit completely, or even only consuming cheese, milk and eggs at one point.
He even credits his stint at founding and becoming the secretary of a vegetarian club in Bayswater, England for giving him some knowledge of training in organizing and conducting institutions.
Anxious to cultivate purity, Gandhi moved from making experiments with his diet based on hygiene purposes to religious ones. Now the concentration was more quantity rather than types of food. Fasting and restriction on diet became the focus to control the desire for the pleasures of the palate which he felt were a correlation to the passions of man.
So on certain auspicious days of the Hindu calendar, Gandhi would go on an exclusively fruit diet or fast. But being aware that an indulgence of taste was possible with even fruit or grains, he preferred fasting or having only one meal a day on holidays. Draining the body thus, he felt food yielded greater relish and the appetite grew keener. He lived on the cheapest fruit possible, wanting to empathize with the poor. Therefore food consisted mainly of raw groundnuts, bananas, dates, lemons, and olive oil. During a fast, Gandhi usually allowed himself only water. He learnt that it was necessary to drink plenty of water, however nauseating and distasteful it may be. Much of all this began in Tolstoy Farm in South Africa.
He learnt from his experiments that “When each organ of sense subserves the body and through the body the soul, its special relish disappears, and then alone does it begin to function in the way nature intended it to do.” The idea was to consume clean, non-stimulating foods and periodical fasting to obviate the carnal mind, which was the real enemy, not food.
Gandhi’s research was extensive, and his conclusions unique. He decided that a brahmachari benefited by a saltless diet. Also, since he discovered that the weak bodied needed to avoid pulses, his ailing wife adopted this abstinence, in addition to sticking strictly to a vegetarian diet during the worst of her spell by forcefully declining beef tea, and actually recovered. He preferred jaggery over sugar, reiterating the fallacy of white foods.
Following his theme of abstinence, Gandhi gave up milk, attributing it to stirring up the animal passions that he was so keen to subdue. Interestingly, the deciding factor to do so was literature he read about the tortures which cows and buffaloes were subjected to by their keepers. This was the main point of his substituting with goat’s milk instead.
So one could say that he was conscious of input to the body that became output from the mind. After all, it is not easy to argue with an incredible man like Gandhi!
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
interesting.
Eating to live?.
hard for me being a chef. lol