[Advaita-l] Advaitic Foods

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

----------------------------------------
> Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 18:27:11 +0530
> From: vmurthy36 at gmail.com
> To: advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org
> Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] Advaitic Foods
>
> The reference to stale food is directly found in Baudhayana Dharma
> Sutra 1 1.2 3 about peculiar customs in South India.
>
> http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/sbe14/sbe1435.htm
>

"... to eat in the company of an uninitiated person, to eat in the
company of one's wife, to eat stale food, to marry the daughter of
a maternal uncle or of a paternal aunt."

These are described as customs unique to the southern part of India.
 
>From this reference, how do you infer that the dharmaSAstra allows
only women to eat stale food, but not men? I am very curious to
know the unique reasoning process that you follow when you post
something about dharma and AcAra to the list.
 
All I see is a descriptive statement about southern practices common
in the time of the author of this dharmaSAstra text. Moreover, what
I see is a description of practices followed by men, not by women. 
After all, the person who eats in the company of a wife or marries a
daughter of a maternal uncle or paternal aunt has to be a man! And we
can also safely assume that one who eats along with an uninitiated
person also has to be a man who has undergone initiation. How do you
exclude one point (eating stale food) from men when all the others
in the same sentence refer only to the practices of men in the south?
 
Vidyasankar