After the practice of cooking came into food habit of Tamilians, the significance of taste evolves or made predominant. Our ancestors layout the food habit of having six tastes namely, uppu (saltness), pulippu (fermentation), kaarppu, kasappu (bitterness), thuvarppu (astringent) and inippu (sweetness). Even nowadays the phrase, “arusuvai unavu” which literally means “food with six tastes” used among people. Arusuvai unavu is nothing but complete balanced diet. Are we really having this above mentioned complete balanced diet (comprising 6 tastes) in our daily life? Definitely NO!!
We may correlate the taste to the following proverb, “too much of anything is good for nothing”. Any imbalance in the diet due to increase or decrease of any one of the taste in food induces disease in body. Like, completely shutting mouth from particular taste food (say bitter in common) leads to deficiency diseases. Hence, we should keep our eye on complete balanced diet which includes the right composition of all 6 tastes.
How to feel these 6 tastes?
Answers are there for us from our ancestors, which includes procedure to eat which I will discuss in this series.
Let us see, how these tastes influences our life?
Our ancestors used to divide food items into 3 categories based on tastes and they are; satvikaa food; rajo food and thamasa food. As I have already discussed the introductory part of these food types, interested readers can refresh the ideas in the post, Food is life.
The character of humans used to vary according to the these three types of food intaken. Satvika food used to make a calm and serene character, rajo food used to give enthusiastic character and thamasa food gives character for destruction. The food which controls the functionality of body (a composition of five basic elements- panchabootham) also controls the character. It is somewhat weird to belief! Yet that is true.
Let us see about the three types of food and its composition in upcoming posts.
Original – www.siththarkal.com
Translated by Lalithambika Rajasekaran
