If the way to a persons's heart is through the stomach, then the way to the soul of a civilization may be through its dietary practices. Examining the food habits of a people has been a staple among anthropologists, some of whom, like Mary Douglas (1966), in her piece on Jewish dietary laws “The Abominations of Leviticus,” have ventured into interpreting the food taboos and dietary restrictions encoded in ancient texts. The ancient Indian literature on dharma devotes considerable attention to matters of food: what kinds of animals and vegetables may or may not be eaten, from what sorts of people one may or may not receive food, what types of conditions make food unfit for consumption, and so on. Such practices have drawn considerable attention among scholars; what has been ignored, however, is the vocabulary used to indicate food prohibitions, a vocabulary that may give us new insights into the ancient Indian world. And that is the focus of this paper.

The dharma vocabulary of food proscriptions contains four words: abhakṣya, abhojya, anādya, and apeya. In this paper I will focus on the first two, abhakṣya and abhojya, which alone underwent significant semantic developments and assumed technical meanings. Apeya is restricted to liquids, principally milk. Anādya is, relatively speaking, the most frequent term in the vedic literature occurring a total of nine times, often in the metaphorical sense that the Brāhmaṇa should not be eaten by the king: brāhmaṇo 'nādyaḥ.