Gandhi's Search for the Perfect Diet: Eating with the World in Mind
Mahatma Gandhi redefined nutrition as fundamental to building a more just world. What he chose to eat was intimately tied to his beliefs, and his key values of nonviolence, religious tolerance, and rural sustainability developed in tandem with his dietary experiments. His repudiation of sugar, chocolate, and salt expressed his active resistance to economies based on slavery, indentured labor, and imperialism.

Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet sheds new light on important periods in Gandhi’s life as they relate to his developing food ethic: his student years in London, his politicization as a young lawyer in South Africa, the 1930 Salt March challenging British colonialism, and his fasting as a means of self-purification and social protest during India’s struggle for independence. What became the pillars of Gandhi’s diet—vegetarianism, limiting salt and sweets, avoiding processed food, and fasting—anticipated many twenty-first-century food debates and the need to build healthier and more equitable global food systems.

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Gandhi's Search for the Perfect Diet: Eating with the World in Mind
Mahatma Gandhi redefined nutrition as fundamental to building a more just world. What he chose to eat was intimately tied to his beliefs, and his key values of nonviolence, religious tolerance, and rural sustainability developed in tandem with his dietary experiments. His repudiation of sugar, chocolate, and salt expressed his active resistance to economies based on slavery, indentured labor, and imperialism.

Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet sheds new light on important periods in Gandhi’s life as they relate to his developing food ethic: his student years in London, his politicization as a young lawyer in South Africa, the 1930 Salt March challenging British colonialism, and his fasting as a means of self-purification and social protest during India’s struggle for independence. What became the pillars of Gandhi’s diet—vegetarianism, limiting salt and sweets, avoiding processed food, and fasting—anticipated many twenty-first-century food debates and the need to build healthier and more equitable global food systems.

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Gandhi's Search for the Perfect Diet: Eating with the World in Mind

Gandhi's Search for the Perfect Diet: Eating with the World in Mind

Gandhi's Search for the Perfect Diet: Eating with the World in Mind

Gandhi's Search for the Perfect Diet: Eating with the World in Mind

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Overview

Mahatma Gandhi redefined nutrition as fundamental to building a more just world. What he chose to eat was intimately tied to his beliefs, and his key values of nonviolence, religious tolerance, and rural sustainability developed in tandem with his dietary experiments. His repudiation of sugar, chocolate, and salt expressed his active resistance to economies based on slavery, indentured labor, and imperialism.

Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet sheds new light on important periods in Gandhi’s life as they relate to his developing food ethic: his student years in London, his politicization as a young lawyer in South Africa, the 1930 Salt March challenging British colonialism, and his fasting as a means of self-purification and social protest during India’s struggle for independence. What became the pillars of Gandhi’s diet—vegetarianism, limiting salt and sweets, avoiding processed food, and fasting—anticipated many twenty-first-century food debates and the need to build healthier and more equitable global food systems.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780295744964
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Publication date: 03/01/2020
Series: Global South Asia
Pages: 264
Sales rank: 767,480
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Nico Slate is professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India and editor of Black Power beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Timeline of Gandhi's Life with Food xi

Introduction: The Scale 3

Chapter 1 Salt 9

Chapter 2 Chocolate 24

Chapter 3 Goat Meat and Peanut Milk 46

Chapter 4 Raw, Whole, Real 74

Chapter 5 Natural Medicine 100

Chapter 6 Farming 119

Chapter 7 Fasting 141

Conclusion: Mangoes and Mahatmas 162

Epilogue: The Gandhi Diet 170 Recipes from Gandhi's Diet 181

Notes 187

Bibliography 211

Index 229

Photo gallery follows page 118

What People are Saying About This

Parama Roy

"Slate makes many significant contributions to the study of Gandhian embodied ethics as well as to studies of food justice and alimentary politics."

Marion Nestle

"Nico Slate’s fascinating account reveals Gandhi as an evidence-based, self-experimenting nutrition guru who tried one diet after another—vegan, raw, calorie restriction—in his quest for physical and spiritual health. Above all, Slate explains Gandhi’s use of fasting as a political means to inspire India to achieve independence."

Julie Guthman

"Slate’s book is an engaging foray into the details of Gandhi’s dietary obsessions, leaving readers to judge for themselves whether a ‘perfect diet’ is attainable or even desirable."

Joseph Alter

"A wonderful book that focuses on the issue of Gandhi’s obsessive preoccupation with diet reform and food in general, pointing out how intricately meshed were the Mahatma’s ideas and practices concerning eating, morality, ethics, and political activism."

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