The following article is excerpted from the Faces Places and Plates, by writer and photographers, Karen Anderson and Pauli-Ann Carriere. Please visit Faces Places and Plates for more writing about South India.
….Our first stop was Satchitananda Restaurant , a raw food restaurant, and a meeting with owner Anandi Vaithialingam.
Anandi
Anandi was born and raised in Tamil Nadu. Her father worked for the railway and they moved frequently. With eight brothers and sisters, they learned to make new friends quickly and never got too attached to any one place.
Between the ages of six to 12 she learned to cook from her grandmother and auntie. She says her house was filled with love and school was fun, “We learned about arts and nature.” Her father always treated women as equals. Her mother trained her in house cleanliness and how to chant mantras so she would come to whatever cooking or household work there was and lend it a calm, pure energy.
“My mother said it was Indian standard that I must learn to make 400 recipes and that it was a women’s role to keep a man connected to the home through food.” Happy to have had this training, Anandi went on to say that she also learned some Ayurvedic cures.
“We did not eat garlic or onions routinely. We had castor oil every six months. Garlic rasam with tamarind and chillies was to cleanse the sinuses.”
First Experiments
From their own garden, they grew an unlimited variety of vegetables. “I think this prepared me to cook vegan without fear. I only look at it as freedom. There’s no rules. I cook a lot from memory.”
Anandi always had a love of botany and gardening. Spinning cotton kept her out of mischief. “All these things inform who Anandi is expressing now,” she said, speaking of herself in the third person.
She came to Auroville in 1991, and in 1997 she helped establish the Kottakarai Organic Food Processing Unit (KOFPU). Foods are cooked there. Raw food was not part of her Indian cooking heritage.
A few years later, she cooked for a Canadian visitor to Auroville who was vegan. “He said to me, ‘You’re a natural at this.’ I was not preconditioned to non-veg (eating meat) and was open to trying many things.”
Anandi ate the raw food she prepared for her guest for a week and noticed she didn’t have to eat a lot to feel full, her senses were sharper, her digestion and elimination improved, she had more energy, sleep needs went down and she felt light and more agile. A Swedish woman who was also raw vegan told Anandi about a school in the U.S. that specializes in raw vegan cooking.
In 2007, Anandi applied to “The Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center” with a letter explaining how she wanted to bring the knowledge back to Auroville and spread it. The school immediately replied and offered her a full scholarship. She spent 10 weeks in Arizona studying spiritual nutrition with Dr Gabriel Cousins, the founder of the school. In 2011, Anandi started her restaurant.
Satchitananda Restaurant
In case you are wondering, “Sat”, “Chit” and “Ananda” are three Sanskrit words meaning absolute – consciousness – bliss. Definitely words to eat by, and truly how people are trying to live in Auroville.
We arrived and walked to the front door across a patio scattered with tables and chairs. Inside, we found a big square room reminiscent of a church hall. There was a serving counter on the far wall that was open to the kitchen. Light streamed in from big windows along the side walls.
Inside the kitchen, dehydrators lined one wall where ovens or a cooktop might be in most professional kitchens. There was no need for industrial HVAC exhaust hoods here. A bank of VitaMix™ blenders for the mainstay of the menu, a rainbow of smoothies, was the only potential for dinner.
The pantry was filled with ripening fruits and Anandi and Veronique sat on the floor while Anandi counted out bananas as a form of payment to Veronique. Veronique is vegan. “Eating an animal would be like eating one of my children,” she said with a shudder.
Even though her restaurant is raw and vegan, Anandi said she is not fanatical about her food preferences. “Many raw foodists become dogmatic or egotistical about their food choices. I believe everyone should follow their own path. My husband is American and still enjoys meat. I cook that for him out of love for him. It does not interfere with my own path.”
It’s the crack of 11 a.m. when the first of Anandi’s team start to arrive. The restaurant is open 12 to 2 p.m. and 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. We bought Anandi’s raw food recipe instructional DVD before leaving her to consciously enjoy her absolute bliss. Her smile beamed us out the door.
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