Question
Good afternoon Guru Maharaja, receive and accept my humblest obeisances and bless my ways.
Appreciated Guru, in a publication in Dominican Republic local media there is some reference the fast food chain will have a menu of vegetarian burgers. So can we Krishna devotees can now visit this type of restaurants and buy it because now they have a vegetarian product?
Answer
Dear Bhakta Jomi,
Please receive my blessings. All glories to Srila Prabhupada.
Spiritual standards are made in levels. Everyting has a second, third, fourth etc. option varying according to time, place and circumstance.
First of all you should know what is the highest standard, which is to eat (honor) only prasadam cooked by second initiated (we call them brahmanas but in vedic society that name would be incorrect), offered to installed Deities by second initiated with Tulasi leaves, with love and devotion.
This is the highest standard.
But sometimes, or I should say unfortunately often, the highest standard can’t be adopted for circumstances of life by those not living in temples and therefore we have many different levels of standards.
For instance we should not eat things cooked by materialistic people. The reason being that our standards of mental and physical cleanliness is different. Also the consciousness of the cook enters into the food and we are after a devotional consciousness.
But sometimes (or often) our lives bring us in situations where this high standard is not applicable.
But for our spiritual lives it is important to know that eating in public places is not good.
Bottomline, we should never eat meat, fish, take intoxicants, from tea to the worse drugs. And we should always offer that to Krishna, even if it is a very simple offering.
So I don’t know what those “vegetarian burgers” are made of. Check them out very seriously and see how they are made.
Your well-wisher
Manonatha Dasa (ACBSP)
PS
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