Gandhi's Search for the Perfect Diet

Eating with the World in Mind

Nico Slate, Anand A. Yang, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Padma Kaimal, Anand A. Yang, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Padma Kaimal

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780295744971
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

CHAPTER 1

Salt

What is life worth without trials and tribulations which are the salt of life?

GANDHI, 1930

On April 6, 1930, Gandhi gathered a handful of salty sand from a crowded beach on the west coast of India. With that simple act, he shook the foundations of the British Empire. A few months earlier, the Indian National Congress had endorsed the goal of purna swaraj, or “complete independence.” Gandhi’s challenge was to make that goal a reality. He had numbers on his side, as British rule required the tacit support of India’s millions. If enough Indians withdrew their support, the British Raj would crumble. India’s population was split along multiple lines—religion, class, caste, and language—and the British used divide and rule tactics to maintain their power. Gandhi needed a strategy that could unite all Indians in opposition to British oppression. He found his strategy in salt.

Everyone needs salt to survive. “Next to air and water,” Gandhi declared, “salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life.” From macaws to moose, many animals travel miles to find salt licks and other natural sources of salt. For much of human history, salt was a precious commodity, traded across deserts and seas. The word salary comes from the Roman practice of giving soldiers a regular payment to purchase salt. Wars were fought to control sources of salt, as they are for oil today. Salt is no longer so precious; while some people struggle to buy their daily salt, many consume large amounts, unaware of the salt packed into everything from bread to breakfast cereal. In the gap between those who have too little and those who have too much, Gandhi saw an opportunity to challenge the British Empire.1

In colonial India, the British maintained a monopoly on the collection and production of salt. The salt monopoly affected all Indians, but it especially hurt the poor. Even a slight increase in the price of salt harmed the millions of Indians with barely enough income to purchase food and other basic necessities. Gandhi deemed the salt monopoly a “curse” and set about to end it. He turned to nonviolent civil disobedience, or what he called satyagraha. From the Sanskrit for “holding firm to the truth,” satyagraha communicated the resistance to injustice that Gandhi understood as the heart of nonviolence. Others called it “passive resistance,” but there was nothing passive about satyagraha.2

In the spring of 1930, the sixty-year-old mahatma walked 240 miles from his ashram near the banks of the Sabarmati River to the coastal town of Dandi. The twenty-four-day journey—referred to as the Salt March or the Dandi March—captured the attention of the world. Gandhi had announced his intention to break the law by gathering natural salt from that most abundant source—the ocean. One man’s defiance could not alone threaten British rule. By gathering a fistful of salty sand, Gandhi did more than challenge the British to arrest him; he appealed to his fellow Indians to join a nonviolent battle for freedom. He was not disappointed. Throughout India, protesters began to produce and distribute salt in open defiance of the law. The Salt Satyagraha had begun.3

Even as he championed greater access to salt, Gandhi limited his own intake and argued that many people consumed too much. Fruits, vegetables, and dairy products contain their own salt—enough, he believed, to sustain anyone who did not have to sweat in the sun to earn a day’s wage. Gandhi experimented with a diet free of added salt; his example would be difficult to follow in today’s world. Sodium is such a common ingredient in processed foods that salt has itself become highly processed. In the words of journalist Michael Moss, “There are powdered salts, chunked salts, salts shaped in different ways with various additives to work perfectly with processed foods.” The ubiquity of salt makes it impossible for the average consumer to reduce sodium intake without a dramatic change in diet. In a society that adds salt to almost everything, sustaining a low-sodium diet entails learning how food is prepared, processed, packaged, and distributed. Gandhi modeled that kind of systematic thinking when he used the salt tax to attack colonial rule, and in his own dietary philosophy. He maintained a diet low in sodium by connecting what he ate to the larger social, political, and economic structures he strove to transform.4

Almost every biography of Gandhi explores the Salt March, but historians have largely overlooked its relationship to Gandhi’s own dietary struggles. He may never have imagined the march had he not grappled so incessantly with salt in his daily diet. It might seem ironic for Gandhi to champion access to a substance he had spent decades avoiding. But he saw no contradiction between the Salt Satyagraha and his own efforts to limit his salt intake. By cutting salt from his own diet while attacking the salt tax, he sought health for his body and for the Indian body politic. “You can serve the country only with this body,” he wrote a colleague in the run-up to his first major nonviolent campaign in India. Only with healthy bodies could nonviolent protesters achieve a healthy nation.5

Gandhi’s embodied nationalism was far more than a banal celebration of physical fitness. To achieve true swaraj (self-rule), Indians had to control their land, their bodies, and their minds; this required health at every level. In Gandhi’s words, “It is impossible for an unhealthy people to win swaraj.” His expansive definition of health led him to grapple with the many obstacles to self-rule. “It is easier to conquer the entire world than to subdue the enemies in our body,” he wrote. As the Salt Satyagraha made clear, achieving healthy bodies required eliminating the inequalities that kept so many Indians desperately poor. Ending poverty could not wait until after independence—it was a necessary part of independence. “To postpone social reform till after the attainment of swaraj,” Gandhi explained, “is not to know the meaning of swaraj.”6

The night before the Salt March, Gandhi scribbled a note to Jawaharlal Nehru, the future prime minister of India. “My dear Jawaharlal,” he began, “It is nearing 10 p.m. now. The air is thick with the rumour that I shall be arrested during the night.” If Gandhi was arrested, Nehru would need to assume a more prominent leadership role. “May God keep you,” the older man wrote the younger, “and give you strength to bear the burden.” Gandhi expected to be jailed long before he reached the sea. He had faith in young leaders like Nehru, but also in the common people upon whom the movement ultimately depended. If he was arrested, he declared, “let every man constitute himself into a leader.”7

Nonviolence made such democratic leadership possible. Unlike war, civil disobedience was open to all. Anyone could manufacture, sell, or buy illegal salt. “Supposing ten men in each of the 700,000 villages in India come forward to manufacture salt and to disobey the Salt Act,” Gandhi asked one crowd, what could the government do? He knew that civil disobedience would bring mass arrests and police violence. Still, the movement would continue. To struggle in the cause of justice was, like eating the right food, a vital pillar of the good life. At a prayer meeting in the days before the march, Gandhi posed a rhetorical question that laid bare the link between diet and sacrifice at the heart of the Salt Satyagraha. “What is life worth,” he asked, “without trials and tribulations which are the salt of life?”8

Gandhi’s goal was not just to change what people ate, but to transform the economic and political structures in which they lived. Through his diet, he linked questions of individual consumer choice with anticolonial social movements. As food scholar Julie Guthman has lamented, “Food politics has become a progenitor of a neoliberal anti-politics that devolves regulatory responsibility to consumers via their dietary choices.” While Gandhi believed in the power of consumers, his food politics went far beyond consumer agency. Making salt affordable for the poor was one goal of his march; equally important was uniting Indians in opposition to British imperialism and ending the poverty and inequality that imperialism sustained. Would salt be enough to achieve such goals? All human beings need salt, but as Gandhi’s own dietary experiments made clear, not everyone needs the same amount. Many Indians had plenty of salt regardless of the tax, and there was good reason to be skeptical that a protest focused on salt would bridge the vast divides within Indian society. Even Gandhi himself struggled to decide whether salt was a vital necessity or a dangerous temptation.9

FROM SALT TO SATYAGRAHA

The politics of salt confronted Gandhi early in life. In one of his first publications, written when he was twenty-one years old, he lamented that many poor Indians lived on “bread and salt, a heavily taxed article.” In that crucial phrase, “a heavily taxed article,” he made clear his disdain for the salt tax, as well as the roots of that disdain. From the beginning, concern for the poor galvanized his resistance. He published his critique of the salt tax in the Vegetarian, a magazine associated with the London Vegetarian Society, Gandhi’s first political community. It was at a gathering of the Vegetarian Society in May 1891 that he gave his first public speech. He was “rather nervous in the beginning,” but the subject of his speech—his diet—was close to his heart, and he overcame his anxiety. In his speech, he repeated the phrase “salt, a heavily taxed article.”10

Gandhi’s opposition to the salt tax grew more ferocious with time. In 1905, writing in his newspaper Indian Opinion, he declared that the tax “should be immediately abolished.” He explained his position in terms of nutritional necessity. “Salt is an essential article in our diet,” he wrote. All people need it to survive—but the poor suffered the most when the price of this basic necessity was artificially inflated. Gandhi’s compassion for the poor inspired him to denounce the “injustice” of the salt tax in his book Hind Swaraj (Indian Self-Rule), published in 1909 and immediately banned by the British. Ten years later, he assigned a student to study the salt tax in preparation for a major civil disobedience campaign. When that campaign failed, he again decried “the blood-sucking salt tax.” By depriving the Indian people of something as essential as salt, the tax revealed the profound alienation at the heart of the Raj. The question, Gandhi argued, was not just whether Indians had access to salt, but whether they had the right to self-rule.11

Gandhi condemned the salt tax for forty years before launching a campaign aimed at its abolition. The idea of a salt march came “like a flash” from God. The year was 1930. The New York Stock Exchange had plummeted and the world was sliding into the Great Depression. In India, economic woes galvanized the opposition to British imperialism, and Gandhi pondered how to strengthen that opposition. Targeting the salt tax provided only part of the answer. Gandhi knew he would ask protesters to gather their own salt. Should he also ask them to sell illegal salt? To march on government stores of salt? Any form of civil disobedience would be met with arrests, but marching on government property would call down the full wrath of the imperial government.12

Gandhi publicly debated the best form of protest. He published a letter from a retired government official who suggested restricting the movement to the collection of natural salt; taking salt from government depots “would be stealing or robbery.” Using the Sanskrit word for violence, the officer stated that such a protest would be “an act of first-class himsa.” Gandhi disagreed. He rejected the distinction between gathering natural salt from the beach and taking it from a government depot. Both forms of protest were illegal. Both were also, he insisted, legitimate forms of nonviolent resistance. “If a robber steals my grain and cooks some of it,” he wrote, “I am entitled to both the raw and the cooked grain.” The British had stolen salt that naturally belonged to the people of India. “The people,” Gandhi argued, had “every right to take possession of what belongs to them.” Convinced of the need for dramatic action, he decided to be as confrontational as possible in opposing what he called the “inhuman monopoly” on salt.13

Before beginning the Salt March, he wrote the Viceroy of India, Lord Irwin, in a last-minute effort at compromise. Gandhi condemned the salt tax as “burdensome on the poor man.” “If you cannot see your way to deal with these evils and my letter makes no appeal to your heart,” he wrote, “I shall proceed with such co-workers of the Ashram as I can take, to disregard the provisions of the salt laws.” The viceroy could have him arrested, but the ultimate power resided with the people of India. If he was imprisoned, Gandhi wrote, “I hope that there will be tens of thousands ready, in a disciplined manner, to take up the work after me.”

The viceroy remained unmoved. He regretted that the mahatma was “contemplating a course of action which is clearly bound to involve violation of the law and danger to the public peace.” Gandhi published the viceroy’s response as evidence of government rigidity, and turned to the Bible to illustrate the injustice. “On bended knees I asked for bread,” he wrote, “and I have received stone instead.” He used the salt tax to illustrate the absence of democracy in India. The autocratic viceroy, appointed from London, was more like a prison guard than a responsible leader; India had become “one vast prison house.”14

To destroy that prison required the courage to confront power. The most dramatic confrontation occurred at the Dharasana Salt Works, a government-run salt factory in Gandhi’s native state of Gujarat. After the completion of the Salt March, Gandhi announced that he would lead a march upon the salt works, and was promptly arrested. In his a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline of Gandhi’s Life with Food
• Introduction: The Scale
• Chapter 1. Salt
• Chapter 2. Chocolate
• Chapter 3. Goat Meat and Peanut Milk
• Chapter 4. Raw, Whole, Real
• Chapter 5. Natural Medicine
• Chapter 6. Farming
• Chapter 7. Fasting
• Conclusion: Mangoes and Mahatmas
• Epilogue: The Gandhi Diet
• Photographs
• Recipes from Gandhi’s Diet
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series Page