What is food – An analysis on non-veg and veg

What is food – An analysis on non-veg and veg

(By Muktipada Behera)

Now a day’s people talk a lot on veg and non-veg food, specially Indians returning from Foreign lands. People take it as a status symbol to say “I am a vegetarian”. Medical science could not conclude anything till date. There are medicines made up from animals bones, oil etc. Veg or non-veg are a matter of habit from childhood. So what our culture says about it?

From the beginning as per human development cycle people were hunting animals for food. Later kings and rich were also going for a hunt to jungle and killing animals like deer etc for festivals. We have many instances in Vedic period eating meat and beef are an auspicious thing. There is a Smriti law “those who rejects meat shall go to hell for as many years as the slaughtered beast has hairs”. So be careful!!!

First time Buddha (as a Hindu monk) enforced rules to stop killing animals and meat-eating. It is known the vegetarianism concept is borrowed from Buddhism. And later a section of Buddhism developed into vaishnavism and adopted vegetarian food as a religious goal. Analysis proves when people were forcefully stopped taking non-veg and they became weak. That helped later India to be conquered by foreign invaders because our king and solders were not physically fit. Before Buddhism nobody dared to invade India, rather India was stretched till Afghanistan.

Let’s fill something better. Anything taken by mouth is food, be it leafs and meats. This is a generic definition. We can make it little bit more generic “Anything taken inside through all our openings (mouth etc) is named as food”. We have five sense organs (eye, ear, nose, mouth, skin) or five openings through which we take food inside. Like sight is a food for eye, sound is a food for ear, smell is a food for nose, and touch is a food for skin.

We should make sure that we are taking healthy and good food through all our openings, not just through mouth. In fact food taken through mouth is a redundant part compared to food taken through eye and ear. So Hinduism gives more emphasis on food for eye and ear, what you see and what you hear in day-to-day life. It gives emphasis on whether you live in a polluted environment so that your skin is taking all bad food for it.

Swami Vivekananda on Food

In the Chhândogya Upanishad (VII. xxvi. 2) there is this passage, "आहारशुद्धौ सत्त्वशुद्धिः — Through pure food the Sattva quality in a man becomes pure."

Swamiji said - Shankarâchârya has said  that the word Âhâra there means "objects of the senses", whereas Shri Râmânuja has taken the meaning of Ahara to be "food". In my opinion we should take that meaning of the word which reconciles both these points of view. Are we to pass our lives discussing all the time about the purity and impurity of food only, or are we to practice the restraining of our senses? Surely, the restraining of the senses is the main object; and the discrimination of good and bad, pure and impure foods, only helps one, to a certain extent, in gaining that end. There are, according to our scriptures, three things which make food impure: (1) Jâti-dosha or natural defects of a certain class of food, like onions, garlic, etc.; (2) Nimitta-dosha or defects arising from the presence of external impurities in it, such as dead insects, dust, etc. that attach to sweetmeats bought from shops; (3) Âshraya-dosha or defects that arise by the food coming from evil sources, as when it has been touched and handled by wicked persons. Special care should be taken to avoid the first and second classes of defects. But in this country men pay no regard just to these two, and go on fighting for the third alone, the very one that none but a Yogi could really discriminate! The country from end to end is being bored to extinction by the cry, "Don't touch", "Don't touch", of the non-touchism party. In that exclusive circle of theirs, too, there is no discrimination of good and bad men, for their food may be taken from the hands of anyone who wears a thread round his neck and calls himself a Brâhmin! Shri Ramakrishna was quite unable to take food in this indiscriminate way from the hands of any and all. It happened many a time that he would not accept food touched by a certain person or persons, and on rigorous investigation it would turn out that these had some particular stain to hide. Your religion seems nowadays to be confined to the cooking-pot alone. You put on one side the sublime truths of religion and fight, as they say, for the skin of the fruit and not for the fruit itself! [CW-5]

Sri Ramakrishna said - "A man may practise intense austerity and japa, but he won't achieve anything if his mind dwells on the world. But blessed is the man who keeps his mind on God even though he eats pork. He will certainly realize God in due time. - Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna"

So blessed is the man who is moral and honest even though he eats pork, worst is he who eats leafs and his mind dwells on all non-sense and he is involved in corrupted act.

References

1. http://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/vivekananda/volume_5/conversations_and_dialogues/xi_xv_from_the_diary_of_a_disciple.htm
2. http://www.belurmath.org/gospel/chapter41.htm