आहारस्त्वपि सर्वस्य त्रिविधो भवति प्रियः ।
यज्ञस्तपस्तथा दानं तेषां भेदमिमं शृणु ॥Āhārastvapi sarvasya tri-vidho bhavati priyaḥ,
yagyastapastathā dānaṁ teṣāṁ bhedam imaṁ śhṛiṇu.- Gita 17.7
He (Shree Krishna) says, in fact, food, yagya (sacrifice), tapas (austerity), and dān (charity) are also classified as sattvic (pertaining to mode of goodness), rajasic (pertaining to mode of passion), and tamasic (pertaining to mode of ignorance). Āhāra (food), food. What we eat also has a classification.
So he says, “Eating healthy food that’s good for your body and good for your mind, that’s sattvic.”
Here He’s not… There’s only one small shlok (verse) for what is sattvic āhāra. There’s much, much more in the Vedas.
So Krishna’s just telling in brief. Of course, we know that sattvic food means vegetarian food, freshly prepared, not over-spiced, because in the next verse, when Krishna’s talking about rajasic food, He says,
“If it’s too tīkha (spicy), it’s too hot, it’s too drying, it’s over-cooked, it becomes rajasic, even if it would have been sattvic.”
So the food, the vegetarian food, should be healthy, fresh, not spoiled by the way we want it to taste, but preserving the good qualities of the food. So rice, dal, grains, nuts, fruits, vegetables, milk, milk products, all of these are sattvic.
Rajasic food, again, is vegetarian, but deep-fried, over-spiced. Spice means chili. He said salt also; salt is rajasic. Make your food salty, it becomes rajasic. Make your food too hot, too much chili, it becomes rajasic.
And tamasic food is non-vegetarian. Meat, chicken, fish, eggs also come in this category. Here He doesn’t name these things specifically, He says smelly things, rotten things. So think about it, even if you just think about it from a visual perspective or a smell perspective. When you pick a vegetable, when you pick a fruit, when you harvest grain, does it smell bad? Is it shocking? Is it, as we say, gross? No. It doesn’t smell bad, it doesn’t look bad. When you kill an animal, it’s shocking, disturbing, smells bad, looks bad.
So use your common sense. Why would we eat food that comes from that kind of thing? If you leave a carrot sitting on the kitchen counter, even for 12 hours, is it going to rot? No. Leave some meat sitting on the kitchen counter and then eat that, you’ll end up in the hospital.
So Krishna is just using these general characteristics of food, but what He’s indicating is that sattvic food is vegetarian and non-vegetarian food is tamas. And when we say sattvic, rajasic, or tamasic, it means that it is also having that effect on our mind when we eat it.
Yes, it’s true, the act of killing an animal simply to eat it because we like the taste of that, instead of eating vegetarian food, yes, that is considered a bad action. And there is punishment for doing any bad action, that kind of bad action included. So it is considered a bad action to eat meat.
But apart from that, when we eat tamasic food, food in that tamasic category, it actually develops the tamas (mode of ignorance) quality of the mind. It helps to develop that.
When you eat sattvic food, it helps to develop the sattvic quality. Of course, it’s not the only thing you have to do. You can’t just eat sattvic food and then behave like a bad person in the world and think,
“I’m becoming Sattvic!”
You combine it with everything.
