Nico Slate is a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of Gandhi's Search for the Perfect Diet: Eating with the world in mind and Lord Cornwallis is Dead: The struggle for democracy in the United States and India.New Delhi: It is health that is real wealth, and not pieces of gold and silver. In our struggles to eat right and to live right, we are never alone. Perhaps that is the greatest lesson of Gandhi's diet. As his praise for Carver makes clear, Gandhi himself learned from many people, as well as from his own mistakes. Gandhi: "I know, that is what we believers in non-violence have to learn from him."Īs we recognise the 150th anniversary of Gandhi's birth, it is fitting to ask what we can learn from Gandhi, his legacy, and his diet. Gandhi: "And yet these people talk of democracy and equality! It is an utter lie."ĭoctor: "But Dr Carver is never bitter or resentful." Gandhi: "But even this genius suffers under the handicap of segregation, does not he?" After being informed that Carver was too sick to travel, Gandhi initiated a pointed conversation.
Gandhi jokingly told him that he would receive the writings only from Carver himself.
#Ganhi sugar story series
In 1942, with the world engulfed in war, he received a series of writings from Carver, hand-delivered by a doctor visiting from the US.
That is part of why his search for the perfect diet is so relatable-it wasn't easy for him to live up to his own dietary ideals.Īt his best, Gandhi connected his dietary passion to his struggles to create a better world. But contrary to his ascetic image, Gandhi loved food.
Did he really need such strategies? I used to think it was easy for Gandhi to abstain from eating. While his obsession with controlling his food intake was often excessive, those of us who have the opposite problem can learn from the many strategies Gandhi employed to eat less. In addition to regularly fasting, Gandhi was a master of portion control. For me, the greatest struggle is to eat less. I prefer fruit to most processed sweets and so am not too troubled by Gandhi's rejection of refined sugar (although when offered dark chocolate, I tend to conveniently forget Gandhi's statement that there is "death in chocolates"). I find it relatively easy to cut back on salt-although I have never tried, like Gandhi, to abstain entirely. What is the hardest? That depends on one's own dietary constraints and one's taste buds. His passion for whole grains is one of the easiest Gandhian dietary precepts to follow in our world. Whereas we tend to make ours with oatmeal, Gandhi preferred a whole wheat porridge that he made from scratch. One of his favourites is a staple in my home as well: porridge. I shouldn't have been surprised: Gandhi himself usually included some cooked food in his diet. I failed to interest my wife or children in Gandhi's raw food diet. Part of what drove my initial interest in Gandhi's diet was my hope that I would learn lessons I could apply in my own kitchen. But his love for raw, wild greens also stemmed from his hope that India's rural poor could find sustainable and affordable sources of nutrition. "Vitamin A is destroyed by the mere applying of heat," he wrote. In addition, he believed that nutrients were lost in the process of cooking. He repeatedly experimented with eating nothing but uncooked food, or what he called "vital food", because it appealed to his love for simplicity. His interest in raw food and wild food, similarly, was both nutritional and political. He might never have conceived of a 'Salt March' if he had not been obsessed for decades with how much salt to add to his own food. His preoccupation with salt explains one of his most renowned acts of civil disobedience. He praised salt as a young man, rejected it entirely in the middle of his life and then turned to moderation as he aged. His dietary and political struggles were interlinked.
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