Eating is one of the main forms of sense gratification, not only to human beings but to most other creatures. Maybe because it’s so intrinsically connected with survival, the impulse to eat is very difficult to control. Usually when one is capable of controlling the tongue one is capable of controlling all other senses. Usually, only people who are extraordinarily determined (or spiritually advanced) can do that. We may be able to restrict eating temporarily for some purpose, but we can’t sustain it long-term.

However, just because eating is so hard to control doesn’t mean we should indulge in all kinds of things. Spiritual life (and human life in general) means discriminating between good and bad, positive and negative. We are supposed to stop indulging in prohibited things and instead eat only prasadam.

Because Krsna is so kind to us, He doesn’t restrict us to a certain menu. Surely, He has His preferences, but still, he accepts what we offer to Him, as long as it’s offered with devotion. The basic principle, however, is that (apart from fruits and other natural ingredients) we can only offer to Krsna things that we prepare ourselves or things prepared by other devotees since Krsna doesn’t accept anything cooked by non-devotees. This is something I believe can cause obstacles in our spiritual life. We are not expected to become ascetics who can radically suppress their eating, but we are supposed to at least limit ourselves to pure food that can be offered to Krsna.

People like to snack, and most devotees are not different. The problem is that we often consume all kinds of industrialized products that don’t fit into the category of things that can be offered to Krsna, and thus we fall from the practice of one of the most basic principles of spiritual life.

This is one of the problems many may notice here in Mayapur, for example. It’s quite common to see devotees leaving stores consuming cans of Pringles, chocolates, and other products that they don’t even bother trying to offer. This is something that reflects what happens all over the world since Mayapur is just a microcosm of our worldwide society.

In previous decades, devotees used to have more discrimination in this regard, but it seems that this is something that is almost lost. How to stop it? Well, one solution would be to make everyone a pure devotee, but it’s hard to imagine how this could be implemented in the short term. To just try to take the products out of the stores would probably not work very well, since as long as there is demand someone else will sell it, and in any case, we would never have control over what stores from the outside are selling. Restriction does not work if one has to just cross the street.

Probably, a more realistic solution would be to have devotees producing such products and selling them to others. These are types of businesses that could generate jobs and provide income to many devotee families, and at the same time provide such demand in a Krsna Conscious way, providing products that are made by devotees and offered to Krsna. Hopefully, such a business could one day even expand and start serving the general population.

Another possibility, in places where there are temples with established deities, would be to just increase the offerings and sell the mahaprasadam to the devotees, offering them such nice preparations that they may forget about all the industrial nonsense. It’s interesting to note that Prabhupada originally conceived the Govinda restaurants as extensions of the temples, where devotees would offer the food to the deities and serve it to the public. This is of course the best.

In any case, at least educating devotees in this regard could be already an important step since many nowadays just don’t know about these things.