Jain Dietary Code

Jain dietary restriction reasons from the doctrine that even the smallest and least visible forms of life carry a soul, and that harming them accrues karma regardless of intent. Root vegetables, onion, garlic, potato, carrot and their kind, are avoided because pulling them up kills the entire plant rather than a fruit or leaf that the plant can regrow, and because the earth around the root shelters organisms that the digging necessarily destroys. The same reasoning extends to honey, which is refused because its collection is held to kill or injure bees, and to any fermented food, whose fermentation is treated as a sign of active microbial life within it.

Water and milk are strained before use, a practical extension of the same principle meant to remove any small organism before it can be swallowed unnoticed. Jain monastics carry this furthest, straining water they carry with them and inspecting food closely before eating, while lay Jains generally practice a less exacting version of the same habits in an ordinary kitchen.

The result is a stricter vegetarianism than that practiced by most Hindus and Buddhists who also avoid meat, since it excludes categories of plant food that carry no obvious connection to animal harm at all, and it marks Jain households and Jain owned restaurants as recognizably distinct even within vegetarian South Asian cuisine generally.

Ratri bhojan tyaga, the renunciation of eating after nightfall, forbids food and often water between sunset and sunrise. The stated reason is again nonviolence: insects drawn to a flame or invisible in the dark might be cooked into the food or swallowed with it, and the eye cannot verify at night what it can verify by day. Strict observers finish the evening meal well before dark and take nothing more until the following morning.

This daylight rule sits alongside a wider Jain culture of fasting that includes far more demanding observances, such as Ayambil, in which only a single bland, plain dish is eaten once a day for an extended period, and the practice of sallekhana, a voluntary and closely regulated fast unto death undertaken at the end of life by a small number of Jain ascetics and, rarely, lay Jains, under conditions the tradition considers spiritually exacting rather than casual. Alongside these, the dietary code sets the daily baseline: what an ordinary Jain household eats and when, on any day at all, rather than during a special observance.

Mendicants observe the strictest form of the whole code, eating only what is offered to them as alms, inspected and accepted according to detailed rules meant to ensure that no violence was done in preparing it and none is done in eating it.