“I began experimenting with my diet in my student days in London,’ said Gandhiji as he lectured residents at the Sevagram ashram in 1935. He’d just relocated to
the India of villages – leaving Ahmedabad where he had been based since his homecoming from Africa two decades before – a paradigm shift about which he felt: “Now we have embarked on a mission the like of which we had not undertaken before.”
He proposed that they completely do away with spices and eat raw food, such as salad, at least once a day while teaching the villagers to do the same because
boiling vegetables killed off their vitamins.
Apart from the fact that uncooked food was virtually unheard of in that era, it’s interesting that Gandhiji advocated vitamins. Their role in preventing illness and
building health had been proposed by a Polish chemist only in the 1910s and it took a while longer for vitamin researchers to win Nobel prizes.
Already in the 1920s, Gandhiji wrote, “Vitamin means vital essence. Chemists cannot detect it by analysis. But health experts have been able to feel its absence.”
Yet I can’t imagine that everybody was feeling jolly as they listened to Gandhiji preaching that day. No masala in the curry? Uncooked food? I virtually see jaws
dropping and eyes popping.
Travelling by train from Delhi to Kanyakumari, one might be tempted to break journey midway. Gandhiji founded his final ashram at Sevagram for the precise reason that it was located geographically in the centre of India.
At the quiet railway station one might find that one is the sole passenger alighting. No hotel in sight. It was of course an even more unassuming village in the 1930s when Gandhiji came and he was particular about not making it assuming, instructing his helpers that “as little expense as possible should be incurred” building his hut.
Next to the ashram is a small museum, but it is also possible to take a room in an old guesthouse where political leaders used to stay when they came to consult
with Gandhiji — a short walk beyond a pipal tree planted by ‘Bapu’ (he preferred not to be called Mahatma) and Gandhiji’s simple hut made of eco-friendly
materials like clay. The cot may be of 1930s vintage, there are no mod-cons, but one is made to feel at home. And one may find oneself welcomed and be asked
to join them for supper.
For example, later in that first year in Sevagram, 1935, he advocated daily consumption of soya beans – which is more nutritious than meat and has marvellous health benefits, as Gandhiji pointed out in a series of articles in his journal Harijan, describing it as what we today would call a “superfood”.
Under his leadership, the ashram also produced its own marmalades from seasonal fruits, peanut butter, and bread, which was made from home-ground coarse unsifted wheat in order to keep it fibre-rich.
The meal consists of chapattis, a boiled vegetable hotchpotch featuring home-grown beetroots and a modest salad. The only spice seems to be salt. Basic but
edible – and it reflected the Gandhian ideals of eating food as if it were a medicine, ‘just to keep the body going.’ Apart from prayers before food, there’s strictly no talking while eating.
Noted Gandhiji in 1940, ‘Silence is obligatory at meals. It is uncivil and a form of violence to criticize while eating any badly cooked item of the food. It is an
interesting fact that if one were to compare one’s experience with notes by visitors back in the day, one would find that the menu has not changed significantly. With a wholesome diet, one would eliminate the need for going to doctors and pill-popping – again a fairly obvious idea to us, but if we just go ten years back in time everybody (including myself) was happily hogging rich dishes stewed in oily gravies without thinking of the consequences.
Or as Gandhiji put it: “I believe that man has little need to drug himself. 999 cases out of a thousand can be brought round by means of a well-regulated diet…” Having encountered such theories as a youth in London, Gandhi would for the rest of his life go on bravely experimenting with food – no-breakfast-diet, vital foods, fruitarianism – as much as he experimented with truth.
He developed over the years a plan which according to him would be the best for mankind — and it is of course vegetarian fare rich in fruit. “A comparison with
other animals reveals that our body structure most closely resembles that of fruit eating animals, that is, the apes. The diet of the apes is fresh and dry fruit.”
One itemised sample menu from 1935 that he planned for village workers contained the following: wheat flour made into chapattis, tomatoes, red gourd, soya beans, coconuts, jaggery, woodapple, linseed oil, milk, tamarind and salt.
In 1934, Gandhi gave instructions to supporters who wished to host him on his tours, “Fried things and sweets must be strictly eschewed. Ghee ought to be most sparingly used. More than one green vegetable simply boiled would be regarded as unnecessary.”
For any gourmand this may sound off-putting, but culinary experts will agree on the point that a certain frugality might actually heighten the basic flavours. In
fact, what Gandhiji advocated would nowadays — when most of us are BP-afflicted diabetics — be considered a preferable fare and, for ethical reasons, food ought anyway be grown in the vicinity (if not in one's own garden) entailing a minimal carbon footprint for its transportation.
But above all, the way Gandhi explored the relationship between eating and health in an age when the concept of “health food” was unknown to most, unlike
today when we know that food habits can kill or cure, gave me plenty of – what else – food for thought. Or to quote what he said after one of his communal dietary adventures, “Almost every one of us has experienced a clearer brain power and refreshing calmness of spirit.”
ZAC O’YEAH writes on travel and food, but is also the author of the Gandhi biography Mahatma! which was short-listed in Sweden
