THE INDIAN FOOD CLASSIFICATION

THE CLASSIFICATION OF FOOD

Food materials were classified into various vargas, which correspond fairly closely to the divisions in use today; sukhadhanya (cereals), samidhanya (pulses), shakna (vegetables), phala (fruit), supyam (spices), payovarga (milk products), mamsavarga (animal meats) and madhyavarga (alcoholic bevera-ges).
However, in ritual terms a different concept prevailed. Rice, wheat, barley and lentils were all raised with the help of the plough, and were therefore term-ed anna or kristapachya. Food materials that grew without cultivation (akrista-pachya) like wild grains, vegetables, and fruit, were broadly termed phala and fell into a different category.
At certain auspicious ceremonies, or for men who had taken sanyas, only the latter category of foods was permitted. Thus the starchy yam or water-chestnut (singhada) would qualify not as anna but as phala, permitted during a fast. So would flowers (pushpa), roots (mula), bulbo-us tubers (kanda), leaves (patra), fruits (themselves also called phala) and some pods or legumes (shimbi). Lentils (masur), as we have seen, qualify as anna, not so chana (the chickpea), which is not classed as an auspicious gra-in. Milk and ghee are ritually pure, especially auspicious and therefore extrem-ely flexible in use as food ingredients. Ghee is quite different ritually from a cooking oil: frying in the former constitutes a superior ritual act, not compar-able to frying in vegetable oil. An outcome of these ritual distinctions is the two major classes into which cooked foods fall, namely kaccha and pucca.