Farm-to-Table Ashram in India
Piggy backing on my Sabbatical Update post, I wanted to share more about impressive dining program at Isha Yoga Centre, the ashram where I have been living for the past two months. Biksha (Isha’s dining hall) serves flavorful yogic cuisine. A team of local chefs run the kitchen like clockwork and an army of volunteers help serve the food.
A typical meal includes:
🌾 Rice (my favs are lemon rice with nuts, coconut rice with herbs & sweet black rice)
🍛 Pongal (SO many kinds of millet!) always served with some kind of saucy dish (ie. curry or sambar) And sometimes chutney too!
🫘 Legumes (ie. black chickpeas, mung beans, lentils — usually tossed with with shredded coconut, turmeric and curry leaves)
🥕 A raw veggie or salad (ie. carrot, cucumber, or green pepper salad)
🍠 A cooked veggie (usually a starchy veggie or some kind gourd in a flavorful sauce)
🌶 A pickle (chili lime, tamarind, or ginger)
🥜 Soaked peanuts (Did you know that soaking peanuts overnight substantially improves the body's absorption of their nutrients?)
🍉 Fruit (ie. Baby bananas, papaya, watermelon, pineapple)
😋 Many times a savory congee, kitcheri, or sometimes sweet porridge called Sanjeevini
🫓 Occasionally, instead of millet, they serve homemade bread like roti or idly (Which I love!)
🟤 And sometimes a sweet treat like a sesame ladoo or a mini banana cake
The meals are made with high-quality vegetarian ingredients — many of them grown on site. In fact, in the last 10 months the 5-acre organic farm at the ashram has supplied the dining hall with 22 tons of fresh produce! (Pictured above is turmeric that I helped harvest last month.)
The dining hall is open for ashram residents twice per day, offering brunch & dinner for thousands of people at a time. On average, they serve 12,000 meals per day, and during busy seasons, their capacity swells to accommodate 20,000 to 30,000 meals per day.
And when I say the operation runs like clockwork, I mean it. 🕖 Doors for dinner open at exactly 6:50 PM and everyone is seated within 8 minutes! ➡️ Volunteers serve the food by coming down each row carrying buckets of food and carefully ladling each item onto every person’s plate. Everyone washes their own dishes at long sinks with 60 faucets at both ends of the hall. Then the whole hall gets flipped for the next batch to enter at 7:35 PM. And if that’s not wild enough, we all sit on the floor in silence 🧘🏻♀️ and eat with our hands. ✋ Well, most of us… I broke down and bought a spoon after the first month of struggling to eat hot soupy food by hand. 🥄😜
In all sincerity, I am so thankful to be on the receiving end of such high-quality food that is so supportive of my yoga practice. And the fact that they make everything from scratch at such a large scale is awe-inspiring! I don’t have any photos of the food because cameras aren’t allowed in the dining hall, but I’ll share sketches of some of my favorite meals with you soon.