The Eternal Food: Gastronomic Ideas and Experiences of Hindus and Buddhists.

• Author: Zimmermann, Francis

Most of the papers collected in this volume were first presented at a conference on Food Systems and Communication Structures, organized in 1985 at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, by R. S. Khare and the late Professor M. S. A. Rao. This is a book about the ways in which the Hindu and Buddhist cultures approach food as an "essence" and an aesthetic "experience" within personal and social life. Several papers discuss the issue of food essence and aesthetics, with special attention to Hindu saints and devotees, for whom foods represent a cosmic principle at one level and a most immediate and intimate semiotic reality at another. The entire book is based upon a theoretical assumption formulated by R. S. Khare in his introduction:

Food in India is never merely a material substance of ingestion, nor only a transactional commodity. It is synonymous with life and all its goals, including the subtlest and the highest. Sometimes highly abstract (approximating the linguistic, aesthetic, and even nontransactional, or supratransactional "grammars") and sometimes palpably tangible (as a physical substance and "bodies"), this food asserts such a life-guiding presence that it concerns, one way or another, the thought and practice of the entire Indic civilization (p. 1).

The general orientation thus defined will be discussed below, after brief presentations have been given of each of the eight papers included in the book.

R. S. Khare (University of Virginia) opens the series with "Food with Saints: An Aspect of Hindu Gastrosemantics." These are general comments on the way Hindu holy persons handle food to serve moral and spiritual purposes, in various forms of "transactions" (for which word Khare gives vyapara as a Sanskrit equivalent, p. 31), encoding foods with special messages as they go about eating. Detached from food, the holy man makes food "speak" and "act" on his behalf. His food conveys his blessings and curses. As leftovers, his food guides disciples toward spiritual experiences. David G. White (University of Virginia) specializes in comparative mythology and, from the rich material he collected on the mythology of the dog-man, he has extracted a well-researched paper, the title of which speaks for itself: "You Are What You Eat: The Anomalous Status of Dog-Cookers in Hindu Mythology." White's precise annotations and exhaustive references should be praised. Contrary to the other contributors to the volume, White is well...