Home > Good Food

What is good food?
We believe that good food should be:

Judged by these criteria, the food at Gaura Yoga is very good indeed.

Healthy & tasty food: local, fresh, well-spiced, skillfully cooked
Anyone who has been to Gaura Yoga can tell you: the food is really tasty and really healthy. “How do you do it?” people ask.

The first component in cooking a great meal is the ingredients. We purchase fruits and vegetables from the local market every week. We are not into using food that has been transported halfway around the world.

Unfortunately, for reasons of cost and availability, we currently cannot buy the best possible organic produce. So in the future we hope to start growing ingredients on our own bio-dynamic farm. The Gaura Haven project is a step in that direction. Please come and talk to us if you want to contribute to fulfilling our dream of cooking and serving food made from the best possible ingredients.

We create as much of our meals from whole foods as possible and aim to become free from processed foods. That is, for example: we bake our own bread, cook our own beans, chop our own tomatoes, knead our own pastries and make our own chutneys and sauces.

At Gaura Yoga we have a great selection of spices. We use them all (though not all at once, of course) to enhance the flavour of each meal. The ideal spicing creates tastes that are out of this world.

The chefs at Gaura Yoga are pretty good. Nevertheless, we constantly try to improve our cooking. Whether we are poring over our huge collection of cookbooks in search of the perfect recipe, learning cooking techniques from each other, or experimenting with different preparations in our free time: we never stop trying to improve the food.

All the cooks at Gaura Yoga are fully qualified, both materially (in terms of skill) and spiritually (in terms of consciousness). Additionally, just like all staff at Gaura Yoga, the cooks are volunteers. They do not accept payment for their services.

Learning the yoga of cooking is no easy task. It is a long process that requires intelligence, discipline, determination and purification. We welcome anyone who is willing to take up the challenge and will train them in the yoga of cooking.

Eco-food: local, seasonal and meat-free
Gaura Yoga aims to be as ecologically sound as possible. The food we serve plays a major role in our sustainability strategy.

The meat-free food at Gaura Yoga helps the environment. A vegetarian diet does more to reduce global warming than driving a super-fuel efficient hybrid car: vegetarianism is the new Prius. The United Nations climate change chief agrees.

Additionally, the vegan food we serve is healthier than a meat-based diet. In fact research shows that eating a plant based diet may indeed reduce your cancer risk (e.g. colon cancer and breast cancer).

It is also better economics. It is far more cost efficient to grow food and directly feed it to humans, than to grow food to feed animals, then kill the animals and feed them to humans.

And finally, the macro-economic crisis of the rising cost of food can be mitigated by a meat-free diet. Therefore Gaura Yoga is, always has been, and always will be meat-free.

Non-violent food: vegan
All food at Gaura Yoga is 100% vegan. That means: no meat, no fish, no eggs, no dairy products and no animal derived ingredients (e.g. avoiding non-vegetarian e-numbers).

Gaura Yoga has always been vegetarian, however, recently we have adopted a vegan policy because we recognize that milk production today is undeniably bound up in the web of animal slaughter and cruelty. Whether organic or not, pasteurized or not, there is mass slaughter. The dairy industry slaughters its cows as soon as they stop giving milk. Just watch some footage of how cows are raised for milk production and then promptly disposed of.

We do not disapprove of milk itself. Far from it. In fact, according to Ayurveda (the ancient Vedic science of medicine), cow’s milk is one of the best foods for human beings. However, Ayurveda also teaches that discoloured, odorous, or old milk is toxic and produces diseases. Modern milk is homogenized, changing its molecular structure and turning it into a grayish liquid, which is then bleached or dyed before being sold. In addition, pasteurization causes milk to become odorous, which must be perfumed with chemicals. Modern dairy cows, too, being more or less tortured throughout their lives, are administered numerous hormones and drugs for various purposes. So all-in-all, by Ayurvedic standards, modern milk is highly problematic and can contribute to disease. All the more reason to avoid it.

The ideal situation would be to get milk the natural way: from cows that are properly looked after and cared for. We aim to establish a centre for cow protection in the future. When we have a source of milk from protected cows then we can drink and benefit from milk in peace, knowing it is good for our health and good for our cows.

Now you may wonder about calcium. Well, due to clever marketing by the dairy industry one may believe milk is our prime source of calcium. However, just like the clever marketing of the meat industry which promotes beef for protein, this is not in fact true. Calcium is readily available from many sources (in order of potency): collard, rhubarb, spinach, tofu, molasses, turnip, okra, soy, kale, sesame seeds, tempeh, tahini, nuts and seeds, etc. (click here for a detailed discussion of calcium without dairy products).

Prasadam: food for the soul
The consciousness of the cook affects the eater. Nothing beats the taste of food prepared and served in a loving mood. That is why we spiritualize all food cooked at Gaura Yoga.

Prasadam, or spiritual food, is food that has been cooked with love and devotion and offered to the supreme origin of all consciousness. The high consciousness imbibed into that food can be directly tasted by the eater. That is the secret ingredient that makes the food at Gaura Yoga taste uniquely unlike any other.

Imagine a cruel, mind-numbing factory where food is mass-produced. The workers in the factory are saturating the food with their anger, frustration and profanities. The consciousness of anyone who eats such food is contaminated with the same bad qualities.

By contrast, the blessed food at Gaura Yoga improves the consciousness of the eater. It is the true happy meal.

Another aspect of prasadam is that it is cooked and offered in a mood of gratitude. We live by the grace of the earth and so we also thank her for providing us with the food we eat. We do not wish to selfishly steal the earth’s resources. So, we offer a portion of the food back to the Ultimate Source; this automatically gives thanks to the earth for her sacrifice. Just like watering the tree at the root nourishes all the branches. An added side-effect of this is that it also removes any bad karma resultant from the killing of the plants we eat. The food at Gaura Yoga is therefore certified “karma-free”.

So by all means, please enjoy the karma-free, blessed, happy food known as prasadam at Gaura Yoga. If beyond that you want to learn to prepare such food yourself, we welcome you to attend our regular vegan cooking classes (check here for upcoming sessions).