Why Indians eat with their Hands

Eww, Indians eat with their hands, it’s so dirty.

Actually, it’s the mosy hygienic thing ever provided you’ve washed them before eating & here’s the tea.

First, in Sanatan Dharma, eating food is not a timepass but rather a yajna-karma which is a ritual offering to the agni or digestive fire in our body. The food, our body & the act of eating are all considered a blessing of Brahma i.e. the Ultimate God. So that’s why you have the prayer “Vadani Kavala Gheta, Naam Ghya Shri Hariche,” which basically means that remembering this Truth before eating will help you stay healthy.

Second, the very sense of touching food with our fingers not only helps us to guage the temperature, but it also tells the body’s digestive juices to start flowing. It has also been scientifically proven to enhance its taste & sense of pleasure to when its picked up by spoons & forks - its more natural as no other animal in nature uses spoons anyway. In fact, the because the five fingers we’ve been given correspond to the panchmahabhootas i.e. the 5 building blocks of the universe - agni (fire), vayu (wind), jal (water), prithvi (earth), akasha (ether) - so using them in nourishment helps us ensure we’re getting max benifits.

This is explained the prayer “Karagre vasate Lakshmi, Karamulye Saraswati.”

To compliment this, we’re told to eat sitting on the floor because when one's feet are beneath the heart (as in a position when sitting on a seat), the blood flow is directed to feet, whereas when one does a Padmasana or Sukhasana position with their spine straight, the heart gets the advantage of directing more blood flow to the stomach, aiding digestion.