ABSTRACT
Yogic diet constitutes a widely disseminated and yet understudied practice in contemporary yoga culture. Engaging critical scholarship from the field of Food Studies, this chapter thus considers the foodways of Gurani Anjali (1935–2001) at Yoga Anand Ashram in Amityville on Long Island, New York during America’s counterculture. The frictions between the predominant countercultural countercuisine and Anjali’s yogic foodways constitute the first instantiation of engaged alchemy that this book will consider. As the author shows, Anjali’s ashram restaurant business, vegetarian dietary practices, and fasting clearly reflected existing forms of food-based social resistance movements popularized in the American counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s that targeted environmental, social, and health food justice concerns. Nevertheless, the author also demonstrates how Anjali and her community harnessed the popularity of particularly well-known practices within the American countercuisine in order to initiate students into the preliminary stages of her yoga system’s embodied, transformative logic. Situating the ashram’s international countercuisine within the broader twentieth-century movement of Westphalian cultural internationalism, the author concludes that Anjali’s seemingly universal yogic ideology was engaged in an ongoing process of translation of a patently somatic yogic internationalism to the ashram’s predominantly White membership.
