Cooking in Ayurveda

Cook Your Food. Foods have their own individuality. They are blessed with the intelligence of their nature. Nature has blessed these with the great powers to maintain our vital powers. But we all have the same intelligence also. When we ingest the food, the food and the human body react with each other. All our cells including our psychology interact with food. It is a clash of two personalities. When these two individualities and intelligences work together for one purpose, i.e. our well being, health is maintained. But when these individualities clash with each other, body and foods react according to their own individualities and conditions like food allergies start to appear.

Cooking is a process developed by the intelligent minds to make foods and human bodies compatible. We, human beings are superior to the animals in this. We know how to eat properly by cooking. Spices and oils used to cook the foods are the best mediators in between us and our foods. The process of Cooking is known as “Samskar”. Samskar literally means the process to enhance, to modify the properties of something. Cooking is a Samskar for the foods.

Here a few steps of cooking food are discussed with their effects on the food items.

1. Boiling-Digestion is a process which is meant to disintegrate the food stuff by the help of different enzymes and secretions of the body. When we eat something well boiled it is easy and feasible for the body to assimilate that food. So by eating the food without proper boiling, we are making it hard for the body to assimilate that food.

2. Adding Spices- Many of us think that spices are just a media to put the taste in the foods. It is not only taste. Spices are blessed herbs, with potential to cure many diseases. By adding spices we make our food tasty, so that all the sense organs will welcome these foods. And on the other hand unknowingly we are medicating our food so that these will be assimilated properly.

3. Oils and Fats- These are a controversial part in the modern medicinal sciences. Oil and fats are told to be blessed with the power of “Yogvahitava”. Yogvahitva is the capability of something to carry the good characters of the next, which is combined with that food stuff, without loosing its own properties. All spices are herbs, which have their medicinal properties in the form of Volatile Oils. Volatile oils are fixed with the oils and fats which are added to the foods while cooking. So cook your food properly and add taste and health in it. Add spices in your food according to your Dosha to avoid the consequences of the Spices, about which you are worried!!

Note by Yogita Manoj Chaudhari
http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=100001362741604&v=wall

Photo By Sudhamshu/Flickr

Please share!