ISKCON Halifax

Most of our ashrams and tem­ples around the world con­duct a large pro­gram on Sun­days com­monly called the ‘Sun­day Feast.’  It con­sists of a philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sion, group mantra med­i­ta­tion or kir­tan, and a sanc­ti­fied veg­e­tar­ian din­ner called prasadam.

We were at a camp­site this last Sun­day and thought, ‘there are so many nice peo­ple out here; lets do a Sun­day Feast!’  Our camp­stove is good, but boil­ing water on it still takes time.  So we decided to use the pres­sure cooker to make kitchari (an awe­some prepa­ra­tion with veg­eta­bles, rice, beans, and spices).  We first pres­sure cooked the rice and beans for 7 min­utes and then the veg­eta­bles and spices for 4 min­utes.  It was preatty mushy but tasty.  Then I made a halava.  By the time the water was boil­ing the semolina (cream of wheat) was nicely toasted in but­ter.  The flavour was mint-carob. 

We started the kir­tan around 8:30 pm.  Jeff and Keith went around to peo­ples’ camp­sites and invited them.  Keith came to the van as I was fin­ish­ing up with the halava, excit­edly look­ing for any­thing with the maha mantra printed on it to give to our guests so they could fol­low along.  He also intel­li­gently grabbed a lantern.  Way to go Keith for see­ing a lack and tak­ing the inni­tia­tive to fill it!  By the time I brought out the halava at 9:30 pm there were 15 peo­ple.  And lots came and went too.  A few of us were inter­act­ing with peo­ple and in the back­ground the kir­tan kept going til 11:00 pm!

The next morn­ing I woke up and grog­gily made my way to the van and was inter­cepted by Thi­ago from Brazil.  We imme­di­ately con­nected and we talked about many things.  He took a higher taste and promised to give some kind of gift or dona­tion.  At one point he told me how he ini­tially became veg­e­tar­ian 5 years ago; So unique that I want to share it with you.

He was hav­ing liver prob­lems and other phys­i­cal ail­ments that forced him to take med­ica­tion.  At some point he read a book on Ayurveda (ancient med­i­cine from India) that men­tioned dif­fer­ent foods are good for dif­fer­ent peo­ple.  He also read in another book, “one can deter­mine whether one is eat­ing too much or too lit­tle of some­thing by study­ing what comes out when one answers the call of nature.”  Black stool is a sign of eat­ing too much pro­tein and light colour stool shows a lack of pro­tein.  So he exper­i­mented by eat­ing red meat and then eat­ing veg­eta­bles day after day, wait­ing for the meat to show up.  After 6 days the stool would go black and stay black for the next 3 days!  He tried this repeat­edly get­ting the same results.  From this he con­cluded it takes 6–7 days for meat to pass through the human body and 3 more days to get it com­pletely out!  He became a vegetarian.

Here is a nice recipe from him for breakfasts:

2 T sun­flower seeds, 2 T sesame seeds, 2 T flax seeds, 2 T pump­kin seeds, enough honey to make a paste, spread on rice cakes

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