Professional Documents
Culture Documents
For millennia the obvious facts about food and see White, 1992; see → Dharmaśāstra). Hindu dis-
eating have carried with them a particularly heavy gust at beef and love of milk contrast with the
cultural weight in India. After being laboriously tribal consumption of the former and indifference
produced, food can be manipulated and trans- to the latter. Brahmanical devotion to the five
formed in manifold ways: it may be shared, products of the cow (pañcgavya, including milk,
offered, distributed, or exchanged. Culinary prac- clarified butter, curd, cowdung, and urine) finds
tices are subject to explicit or implicit rules: what, its inversion in tantric practices (pañcamakāra,
with whom, and how food is eaten is prescribed as practices or symbolism surrounding the five “m”:
well as proscribed. Food is ingested and becomes flesh [māṃ sa], fish [matsya], liquor [madya], the
part of the body. Therefore, food is a key symbol female consort in sexual intercourse or, in alter-
of personhood and social identity. It is the first native interpretations, “salty food” [mudrā], and
object in everyone’s life that is loved, but it may sexual intercourse [maithuna]). Brahmanical
become an object of hate or disgust as well. Com- concern with ritual purity (śuddhi), which finds
mensality makes and breaks groups. expression not only, but especially, in contexts of
Three aspects of food and eating among Hin- consumption (Khare, 1976a), has its opposite in
dus seem to be particularly pertinent. First, food is the Aghora ascetic (→ Aghorīs), who supposedly
at the same time a material, moral, and mental dines on urine and feces (Parry, 1994, 251–271).
fact; it is concrete as well as abstract. Dichotomies The → Kṛsṇ ̣a devotee’s love of the “mountain of
of Western thinking are applicable only with dif- food” (Toomey, 1992) stands out against the “fear
ficulty (Marriott & Inden, 1977). With the inges- of food” and the value of fasting of the Jain ascetic
tion of food, one is also digesting a moral quality (Jaini, 2000).
that influences the very nature of the eater. In par-
ticular, notions of ritual → purity guide consider-
ations of cooking and consumption. The ingestion Violence, Power, and Consumption
of relatively impure food may affect not only a
person’s health and social status but also the pros- During the early vedic period, the paradigm of
pect of a favorable rebirth. Hence, transacting and food in the violent model of eaters and eaten
consuming food involves risk. pervaded ideas of nature and society alike. The
Second, related to these moral aspects of food, matsyanyāya (“law of the fishes”), as it was later
Hindus display a preoccupation with states and called, prescribed that the weak are the food of the
transition. Alimentary practices frequently aim at strong and that ultimately every being is some-
boundary maintenance in order to control the cir- one’s food. Humans provided the gods with food
culation of wanted and unwanted qualities. To a (meat, milk, and wheat) and drink (made from
significant extent, families, → castes, and persons the soma plant; see → intoxication) through their
try to maintain their moral and ritual integrity sacrifices and dined in turn on animals, whose
though regulating consumption. In such an envi- foods were the plants, which feed on water,
ronment, transgressions of boundaries such as in the basis of all food (Smith, 1990, 180). The
inter-commensality have a particular cultural rel- Śatapathabrāhmaṇ a thus states,
evance. The great one is Agni (the fire), and the great
Third, considering the role of food in Hindu (thing) of that great one are the plants and trees,
religion (see → ritual food), one has to note that for they are his food; and the great one is Vāyu
food practices are relational, even oppositional (the wind), and the great (thing) of that great
(see Ulrich, 2007); one person’s affection is another’s one are the waters, for they are his (the wind’s)
abomination. If not cannibals, the others certainly food; and the great one is Āditya (the sun), and
are “dog-cookers” (Śvapacas) as Brahmans used the great (thing) of that great one is the moon,
to classify despised groups in Manusmṛti (10.51; for that is his food; and the great one is man, and