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SriRangaSri List Archive: Message 00019 Jun 2004

 
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                (continuing from Part 5)
-------------------------------------------------------

Dear friends,

Next, says the Bhagavath-Gita, there is Food that
generates "tamas" -- energy which is actually all
"anti-energy". 

"Tamasic" food is fit for the Man who conforms to the
mould of the Hedonist. He is the quintessential
Degenerate. He is so full of sloth, lust and
ignorance. He wallows in the many follies he himself
authors in life and of which he ultimately becomes
victim. Such a man's dinner plate, says the Gita, is
generally heaped with all manner of  stale, putrid,
fermented, intoxicating and stimulating foods. "Tamas"
in food degrades and destroys everything fine and
noble within the human body -- virility, good cheer,
moral integrity and intellectual vigour. (Chapter
XVII.10)

The most common examples of "tamasic" Food is what the
Gita calls "yAta-yAmam" i.e. foodstuff that has been
unnaturally preserved for unnaturally long periods of
time. Under this category would fall all manner of
foods kept "preserved" throughout a period of
so-called "shelf-life" through methods of innovative
packaging, refrigeration, cold-storage and micro-wave
as well as by the use of chemical additives and
preservatives.   

All "packaged", "ready-to-cook", "ready-to-eat",
"frozen-fresh", "instant-food", "ready-to-microwave"
foodstuffs that one might see while strolling along
the long shelves and aisles of any large super-market
or department-store anywhere in the world, might
eminently qualify indeed to be called "yAta-yAmam".
They are all essentially "tamasic" Food in nature.
Consumption of liquor, wines, tobacco, soporifics and
many of the carbonated, tinned and canned foods of the
world would also, going by the standards of the Gita,
be wholly 'tAmAsic' in nature. The advent of the
"packaging industry" and the mass-proliferation of its
ingenious products -- viz. tetrapacks, aluminium-foil,
plastic-cartons etc. -- has done much indeed to
promote and purvey "tamasic" foodstuff in the modern
consumerist world. Thanks to modern packaging methods,
even "sAttvic" foods can now be turned into the
"tamasic" kind. 

The refrigerator and the microwave are both excellent
kitchen conveniences of the modern-day. As long as
they are used to keep home-food or foodstuffs fresh
and unspoilt over limited periods of time, they have
enormous utility. But unfortunately, both appliances
in recent times have come to be over-exploited. Like
industrial packaging, they too now have become tools
of "abuse through preservation".

Prolonged preservation, not temporary refreshment, has
become the sole purpose of these two appliances. One
merely has to inspect a sample of home refrigerators
anywhere in the world today and the inventory will
almost certainly reveal half the food-items therein to
be a week or more old, if not months. In other words,
do not be surprised to find a lot of "yAta-yAmam"
inside your refrigerator at home...

The purpose of the household refrigerator lies
increasingly today only in "preserving" rotten
packaged, ready-to-cook food. And the microwave, that
wonder-tool of modern invention, the pride and envy of
housewives all over the world, too only serves in
turning rotten, stale "tamasic" food into "piping hot"
"rajasic" condition. 

Between the three of them -- modern packaging, the
refrigerator and microwave -- they seem to have
somehow succeeded world-wide in perpetrating precisely
that sort of "abuse of Food" which the Upanishad
warned against through that famous commandment
--"annam na nindhyAth!" -- "Thous shalt not abuse
Food".   
          
                 *********
              (to be concluded)

Rgds,

dAsan,
Sudarshan






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