Simplicity in diet

April 10, 2023

One of the main themes of the 30-day Gandhi challenge is evaluating our relationships with various components of our lives. Although I didn’t accept the vegan challenge this month, giving up animal products in January expanded my perspective and it is an experiment that I’ll repeat in the future.

Mohandas Gandhi experimented with his diet throughout his life, especially during the first half of it. As a teenager, he tried eating meat, in violation of his family’s religious practices. Although his first meal of goat meat produced a nightmare where he imagined the bleating of the animal in his stomach, he later described himself as “a relisher of meat-dishes.” Studying in London a few years later, he read A Plea for Vegetarianism and became “intellectually converted to vegetarianism.”

Socializing with the London Vegetarian Society led to a variety of other dietary experiments, often contradictory. There was a bread and fruit diet, then he gave up all starchy foods. Another short-lived experiment was living on only milk, cheese and eggs!

After establishing his law practice in South Africa, Gandhi continued his efforts to find the perfect diet. Fruits and nuts were a common theme. Fruit was plentiful in the warm climate, and Tolstoy Farm contained many mango trees. By the second year there, Gandhi was mostly settled into a food regimen he described as a “saltless diet consisting mainly of fruit.”

After he returned to India in 1915, he traveled the country and found a new problem arose. As an honored guest, his hosts would often procure a lavish frutarian menu for him. In his autobiography, he describes his visit to the once-every-12-years religious Kumbha fair with 1.7 million other pilgrims, where he found “more of [their] absentmindedness, hypocrisy, and slovenlyness, than of their piety.” After a “night immersed in deep thought,” Gandhi determined he “must impose some act of self-denial… in atonement for the iniquity prevailing there and purify” himself.

On April 10, 1915, Gandhi vowed that he would not eat “more than five things during 24 hours…. includ[ing] condiments” and that his final meal of each day would be before sunset. This would ease considerations for his future hosts and lock himself into a simple diet. Even after many years of observing it, he spoke highly of the benefits of this vow.

I can’t imagine the logistics of only eating five items a day, but it sounds like an interesting challenge. Maybe I’ll try it for 30 days in the future!

What food would you consider it a challenge to give up for 30 days?