Anyone who reads Mahatma Gandhi’s primary writings, like his 96-volume collected works, will be startled by the sheer amount written on nutrition. “My experiments on dietetics are dear to me as my researches on ahimsa. They give me recreation and joy,” he wrote in The Story of My Experiments with Truth. He constantly experimented with his diet, trying new foods or regimens.
Gandhi also happily advised others on what they to eat, and ended letters to family members with a description of his current diet and an exhortation for them to tell him what they were eating. He tried to keep up with dietary writings, like the works of the American dietician J H Kellogg, whose magnum opus, The New Dietetics: A Guide to Scientific Feeding in Health and Disease, he received in 1927. “It is enough to make one giddy even to contemplate reading that volume,” he wrote to his American correspondent R B Gregg.
Which is why, among the myriad ways modern India might disappoint Gandhi, our continued failures on nutrition might be what hurts him most personally. What is the value of our technological leaps and massive infrastructure development when you know that lakhs of children remain hungry or are eating food of such poor quality that their lives are stunted from the start?
Yes, this is simplistic, and arguments about how development at all levels raises the economy in general may be true. But can you honestly say you haven’t felt that sickening feeling sometimes, as you speed by to another restaurant, that India still has people whose daily nutritional intake is less than what was probably wasted in preparing your meal? The tourism ministry recently announced a deal to get Michelin’s restaurant guide to India. Would Gandhi have felt this was an achievement?
What is particularly odd is that this nutritional deficiency exists at a time when more nutritional advice comes at us than ever before. Companies push products on us. Social media influencers attack companies for doing that, and make their own suggestions. Politicians and pundits offer advice on how we can improve our life by changing our diets. And the algorithms are always telling us to take a supplement, stop eating this, start eating that and find the food hack that will deliver us true health.
Yet, the lecturing doesn’t seem to be accompanied by listening. When it comes to nutrition, there seems to be gap in understanding why people make their food choices. What you eat has become a way to label and then judge you, rather than a way to understand you. A good example is the government’s millets campaign, which never seems to end—as was evident with the millet pulao served at the BRICs banquet. But where are all the people willingly eating snacks, main meals and banquets made of millets?
The campaign never stopped to ask why Indians stopped eating millets. Traditional consumption of millets started dropping from the late 19th century, as maize in particular substituted it, along with increased availability of rice and wheat. Indians didn’t forget that millets were healthy, but just didn’t like eating them as much as these other grains. Millets are, as their name indicates, mostly grains so small that their husk can’t be removed, so they must be consumed whole.
This is what makes millets more nutritious rather than the starch-heavy milled wheat and rice, but also makes them stodgy when cooked. The millet campaign might have had more success if it started by working for solutions people would accept. This might have included focusing on ragi, the one millet that’s easy to eat, or advocating easier-to-eat mixes of millets and starchy grains. It might even have concluded that most people would not eat millets, but they could still be grown to ferment into ethanol or as a substitute for sugarcane, as one variety of sorghum (jowar) can be grown.
But this would have meant really engaging, without judgement, with what people ate and didn’t. It was easier just to tell them that they should eat instead, and then jump on this badgering bandwagon with books, articles and events—which people would consume and then go back to eating rice and wheat. This is a recent example, but this tendency to find magic solutions and then lecture Indians on why they should follow them goes back decades—to the lean years after independence and famines of the 1960s.
Gandhi’s long engagement with diets suggests a slightly different approach. He was ready to give advice, but also listen to it—hence his regular requests for correspondents to tell him what they were eating. He experimented with many different diets—salt-free, fruitarian, raw food—but ultimately concluded that there was no one solution, just constant listening to one’s body and experimenting with what works. He was always interested in the potential of new foods—for example, discussing the potential of avocados with Paramahansa Yogananda, the California-based guru, or the soy-based experiments of Narahari Rao, Vinoba Bhave’s father.
Gandhi was a committed vegetarian, but he was never dogmatic about it, nor did he believe that it automatically made you better or even healthier. From his early years as a student in London, where his political awakening happened while working with the Vegetarian Society, he was aware of how painfully dogmatic and divisive vegetarians could be and how, crucially, this was counter-productive to their cause.
When a correspondent raised a hypothetical question about whether a husband who had become a vegetarian could compel his wife to do the same, Gandhi replied that, on the contrary, it was his duty to keep buying her meat while still trying to persuade her to switch from true conviction. He believed that real change could not be achieved through forcing a choice, but from genuinely convincing people why a certain way was best.
Sometimes, this could mean accepting unwelcome facts. Ela Gandhi, his granddaughter based in South Africa, once told me how she made him do this. People visiting Sevagram often admitted, out of his hearing, that the food at the ashram tasted truly terrible, something Gandhi ignored since his focus was just health. But when visiting him Ela, who was just a child then, once told him indignantly: “Why do you call this place Sevagram? It should be Kaddugram because that is all that ever seems to be cooked.” Gandhi laughed and gave instructions to cook more than just pumpkins for a while.
Vikram Doctor | Senior journalist
(Views are personal)
