GANDHI REMAINED A COMMITTED VEGETARIAN – BY CHOICE – ALL HIS LIFE
An austere eater, Gandhi constantly experimented with his diet. These experiments were based on his beliefs and part of a deep, spiritual quest
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This was the foundation on which everything else was built. Gandhi came from a vegetarian Gujarati family and never ate meat in his life, except for a brief period as a schoolboy, when he did so at the urging of his elder brother’s friend who convinced him that the English were able to rule over Indians because they were meat-eaters. Gandhi records in his autobiography that he must have had half a dozen secret “meat-fests” over a period of one year.
But the fact that he was lying to his parents gnawed at his heart. “In their [his parents’] lifetime, therefore, meateating must be out of the question. When they are no more and I have found my freedom, I will eat meat openly, but until that moment arrives I will abstain.” But he never ate meat again. Before leaving for England to study law in 1888, he vowed to his mother that he would not touch meat or liquor. He kept his word, though vegetarian food was hard to come by and he was always hungry.
He eventually found a vegetarian restaurant on Farringdon Street (“the sight of it filled me with the same joy that a child feels on getting a thing after its own heart”), which also stocked a book that influenced him deeply: English writer Henry Stephens Salt’s Plea for Vegetarianism. Gandhi ate his first hearty meal
Tobacco
Alcohol
Drugs
Tea
Coffee since his arrival in England there, and followed it up by reading Salt’s book from cover to cover. After that, says Gandhi, he became a vegetarian by choice (as opposed to being vegetarian because of family tradition).
He joined the Vegetarian Society and made English friends who were part of the Society. For a while he had a London roommate, Josaiah Oldfield, a barrister, who was an active member of the Society. Later, when he was in South Africa, he met Henry Polak, a British-born Jew, at the Alexandra Tea Room, the only vegetarian restaurant in Johannesburg. Polak ended up becoming one of his closest friends. But he also lost friends – an English family in South Africa asked him to stop visiting them, because their son was beginning to refuse eating meat.
Gandhi firmly believed that a meat diet was not good for health, because meat brought with it the “defects of the animals from which it is derived.” But more importantly, his vegetarianism had deep spiritual and philosophical underpinnings. It was part of his commitment to ahimsa, the cornerstone of his politics. Eating meat meant doing violence to animals, who, he believed, had spirits and souls. Vegetarianism was also a crucial part of brahmacharya (see box), which meant exercising selfrestraint, in order to control the senses. Gandhi favoured a low-salt diet. And though he liked them, he had read that the “weakbodied” should avoid pulses. In his autobiography, he recounts a time in South Africa when his wife Kasturba wasn’t well. Gandhi entreated her to give up salt and pulses. She threw him a challenge: even he would not be able to give them up. She should have known better. Gandhi stayed away from both long after they returned to India. “Medically there may be two opinions as to the value of this diet, but morally I have no doubt that all self-denial is good for the soul,” he wrote. Gandhi loved fruits. For years subsisted on fruit and nuts. But he noticed that this diet often caused friends some inconvenience. When he was the guest of a friend in Calcutta, he says that all the fruits and nuts available in Calcutta were ordered for him and the women of the house stayed up skinning various nuts.
So, on a visit to Hardwar for the Kumbh mela, he took a vow never, while in India, to take more than five articles of food in 24 hours and to finish his last meal before sunset. He mostly kept the strict five-foods vow, once again underlining his ascetic approach to food. Gandhi felt that milk makes the brahmacharya vow (he had taken the pledge to remain celibate in 1906) difficult to observe because milk was partly a stimulant. (Unsurprisingly, it was his early mentor, the Jain mystic Raychand, who told Gandhi that “milk stimulated animal passion.”)
But this was not the only reason. As always with Gandhi, there was a moral reason – “We are certainly not entitled to any other milk except the mother’s milk in our infancy.” There was also a health reason – “Both milk and meat bring with them the defects of the animal from which they are derived.” And there was the humane, ethical reason – Gandhi came across some literature from Calcutta, which described the tortures cows and buffaloes were subjected to by their keepers.
In 1912, when he was living in Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, he pledged to abjure milk, along with his friend and close associate Hermann Kallenbach. Both men felt milk was not necessary for the human body. But Gandhi was forced to review his no-milk policy when he fell ill with severe dysentery in the middle of a recruiting campaign in Kheda for World War I and doctors insisted he needed milk to shore up his strength. Gandhi gave in. In May 1929, Gandhi attempted a serious experiment with eating only raw, uncooked food. A month in, he wrote in his weekly journal, Youngindia, “I have lived for years on uncooked fruit and nuts, but never before beyond a fortnight on uncooked cereals and pulses. If it succeeds it enables men and women to make changes in their mode of living. It frees women from drudgery… the value of uncooked food is incomparable.”
His daily raw diet mostly consisted of: Sprouted wheat 8 tolas*
Pounded almonds 4 tolas
Whole almonds 1 tola
Green vegetables, such as doodhi or cucumber (grated) 16 tolas
Raisins (or fresh fruits) 20 tolas
Lemons 2 tolas
Honey 4 tolas
But by mid-august he had to abandon his diet because of an attack of dysentery. “It appears I was not digesting the raw foods I was taking,” he wrote in Young India. He did add though that “as a searcher for Truth I deem it necessary to find the perfect food for a man to keep body, mind and soul in a sound condition.”