A thought for Food & food for Thought - Part 2 of 7

[Guest guest]

(continuing from Part 1)

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Dear friends,

 

Since "annam", Food, is recognized to be the ultimate

source of all Energy, the Upanishad exhorts us to take

great care in conserving and using it wisely. There

are 3 great commandments that have been issued in this

regard:

 

(1) "annam na nindhyAth!"

 

(2) "annam na pari-chaksheeta!"

 

(3) "annam bahu kurveeta!"

 

(Taittiriya Upanishad: "brghuvalli")

(meaning):

 

"Thou shalt not abuse Food!"

"Thou shalt not discard Food!"

"Thou shalt grow Food in abundance!"

 

Tragically, we live today in a world where all 3

Upanishadic commandments are observed more in the

breach than in obedience.

 

The clearest example of large-scale abuse of Food one

can find is in the industrial rearing of cows, sheep

and goats meant for slaughter far more than for dairy.

Cows are reared on modern, "scientific" methods of

dairy-farming. Instead of letting cows to natural

pasture, they are fed with artificial steroidal diet

to boost tissue-growth and body-weight. Way back in

1995, there was a worldwide disaster called the "mad

cow disease" which was a direct result of industrial

dairy-farming. Thousands of cattle afflicted with the

"mad-cow" disease were forthwith slaughtered and

destroyed... It was Man who had mindlessly abused an

important Food-source of the world but blamed the

insanity of it all on poor cows. It was a brutal

violation of "annam na nindhyAth!".

 

Early this year in 2004, close to 2 million chickens

raised in poultry-farms across countries such as

China, Thailand and Taiwan, and meant for sale to

worldwide fast-food retail franchisees like

MacDonald's and KFC, were all thrown into incinerators

and destroyed whole-sale. Reason? Because they were

found to have contracted a deadly epidemic called

"bird-flu". Once again, this was a direct result of

greedy, profit-driven, industrial approach to

poultry-farming. Two million poultry were farmed

mindlessly and then slaughtered equally mindlessly...

This in a world where 2 million children are known to

suffer from severe malnutrition every year! There

cannot be a more glaring example of "annam na

pari-chaksheeta!" in this world!

 

In the late 1980s and early-1990s, in the coastal

districts of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala,

Karnataka and Mahrashtra, there was a craze amongst

farmers to switch from cultivating paddy to prawns.

They saw there was far more profit to be made from

intensive-farming of prawns on their fields and

exporting them to US, Europe and Japan than in growing

rice and selling it to the Government of India. The

result was a dangerous decline in food-stocks in the

country's warehouses not to mention environmental

degradation of some of the most fertile coastal-belts

of rural India. This was a case of farmers getting

more excited about "greenbacks" than about "green

revolution"... and it was a grim reminder of what

happens when Man does not abide by the Upanishad

dictum: "annam bahu kurveeta!".

 

************

(to be continued)

 

Rgds,

 

dAsan,

Sudarshan

 

 

 

 

 

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