Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet

Gandhi connects what we eat to our deepest values

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.

Nico Slate is associate 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 (Harvard University Press, 2012); and editor of The Prism of Race: W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson and the Colored World of Cedric Dover (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Black Power beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).Yang Anand A. :

Anand A. Yang is professor of international studies and history at the University of Washington. He is coeditor of Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History (Hawai'i, 2005), coeditor of Thirteen Months in China: A Subaltern Indian and the Colonial World (Oxford, 2017), and author of Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia (California, 2021).Sivaramakrishnan K. :

Kalyanakrishnan "Shivi" Sivaramakrishnan is Dinakar Singh Professor of India and South Asia Studies, professor of anthropology, professor of forestry and environmental studies, and codirector of the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University.Kaimal Padma :

Padma Kaimal is Batza Professor of Art and Art History at Colgate University. She is the author of Scattered Goddesses: Travels with the Yoginis (Association for Asian Studies, 2013) and Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space (Washington, 2021).

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.

"[D]eep, wise book about the eating life of one of the moral giants of the modern world."

"[A] deft and careful exploration of the philosophical underpinnings of Gandhi’s dietary views."

"A marvelous and well-written book."

"Will be of significant interest to Gandhi scholars and to those with a commitment to exploring the ethics, sociology, and history of food."

"Brings a new perspective to a familiar figure through an investigation of the archive of diet."

"[Slate] finds a new angle on one of the most consequential leaders of the last century, and then he fills in that angle with nuts and milk and fruit. You don’t see many portraits like this one, constructed out of all the food that made the man."

"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."—Julie Guthman, author of Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism

"Slate makes many significant contributions to the study of Gandhian embodied ethics as well as to studies of food justice and alimentary politics."—Parama Roy, author of Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial

"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."—Joseph Alter, author of Gandhi's Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism

"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."—Marion Nestle, author of Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat