![]() ![]() ![]() He encouraged the consumption of raw vegetables and fruits, partly to enable women to get a reprieve from the kitchen. Like most early adopters, he was led to modify his search by the exigencies of his time and the demands of his health.Īt Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, for instance, Gandhi urged the residents to grow the food on their plate. Long before zero-waste lifestyles and vegan diets gained social currency, he was experimenting with these modes of living. Structured around the pillars of his diet-“vegetarianism, limiting salt and sweets, rejecting processed food, eating raw food, (and) fasting"-the book also reflects on the prescience with which Gandhi anticipated contemporary movements for the ethical production, consumption and dissemination of food. The result of scholarly research, Slate’s book demystifies Gandhi’s dietary politics for the common reader. Gandhi’s Search For The Perfect Diet-Eating With The World In Mind: By Nico Slate Orient Blackswan 240 pages ₹850. As Gandhi realized over the years, his pursuit of the perfect diet would remain elusive-always a work in progress, built on foundations that were periodically shaken by his precarious health or challenged by scientific findings. His body was the site where this relationship was played out-be it through his rejection of meat and processed foods or the periodic fasts he undertook. Similarly, though he roused the entire nation to participate in the salt satyagraha in 1930, Gandhi remained a staunch advocate of a salt-free diet, avoiding salt in his food for years.įor Gandhi, the question of choosing a diet was inexorably tied to the expression of his political beliefs. But even as Gandhi remained militantly opposed to sugar, accusing it of being the harbinger of lust, he also had a lifelong weakness for sweet fruits, especially mangoes. His disapproval of chocolate, for instance, was not linked so much to the potential health risks it posed as to his awareness of the exploitation of slave labour on sugar plantations across the world. Yet, like everything else in his life, Gandhi’s attitude to food was also complicated, always evolving, and often self-contradictory. As historian Nico Slate puts it in his new book, Gandhi’s Search For The Perfect Diet: Eating With The World In Mind, “For Gandhi, a sweet tooth was the ultimate gateway drug, weakening self-control and paving the way to a life of reckless hedonism." Chocolates, he went on to say, inflamed greed, making us vulnerable to gluttony. “I see death in chocolates," he wrote, correlating the appeal of sweets with the development of immoderate passions. Gandhi made an observation that was typical of the moral absolutism associated with him. ![]()
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