Tenth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Based on archival and ethnographic fieldwork focused on the category of “yogic diet” undertaken in 2016 and 2017, this paper follows foodways through a contemporary yoga community known as Yoga Anand Ashram (YAA) in Amityville, New York. YAA was founded by an immigrant guru from Calcutta named Gurani Anjali (1935-2001) during America’s countercultural movement, and maintains operations today. Adopting Anna Tsing’s notion of “frictions,” I identify two important cultural conditions that allowed for the creation of what is more broadly conceived as “yogic diet” in American modern yoga culture. First, I consider the role of the countercultural environmental movement, and the ways in which food played a role in aspirations to make the personal political. Second, I show how the community’s adoption of a vegetarian diet, and its popular vegetarian restaurant known as “Santosha,” not only reflected the aspirations of particular textual yoga teachings adopted by YAA pertaining to proper diet, but were enabled, following Belasco, by the “hip enterprise” movement, as well as the notion that the personal was political. Countercultural America’s aspirations to be in harmony with nature, and to do so primarily through a vegetarian diet, created fertile conditions for a transnational conjuncture resulting in a distinctly American “yogic diet.”