Āhāra

What people grow, cook, offer, and abstain from — cuisine as geography and season, and diet ideas as philosophy and identity.

Scope

Regional cuisines as climate, crop, trade, and technique; agricultural calendar and festival foods; temple kitchens and prasāda; philosophical dietetics (sattva, ahiṃsā, fasting) as Traditional attribution when doctrinal; surveyed diet facts hedged by definition and dataset.

Out of scope / common mistakes

“India is vegetarian” as nation-essence; Ayurvedic diet as unsigned medical prescription; erased diversity (meat, fish, millet, Islamicate and Christian foodways, tribal cuisines); superfood marketing.

Care rules

Statistics only with survey name and definition in depth work. Doctrinal food rules from within tradition, not as universal health science. Community food rules sit on the Samāja border. Ingredients with foreign origin (e.g. chilli) also belong under Pravāsa.

Load-bearing concepts

Concept	Orientation	Depth later when…
Regional cuisine	Geography shapes the plate	History of a dish or technique
Prasāda	Offering and blessed food	Institutional kitchen histories
Vegetarianism rates	Contested popular fact	Survey comparison
Grain and crop history	Staples change with agronomy and policy	Millets, Green Revolution
Food exchange	Food history is world history	Chilli and other transfers

Topics we plan to cover

Who is vegetarian in India? Further cuisine and prasādam pieces.

• Deccan millets and the pre-Columbian Indian diet (essay in preparation)