Reviews:

“[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.”

—Seattle Review of Books

“A marvelous and well-written book.”

— Food Anthropology

“This illustration is so simple, yet so clever. It’s so striking and playful.”

— Spine Magazine

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

— New Books Network

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

—Choice

Description:

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.

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

About the Author:

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.

Target Audience:

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