For travellers who have done the seven-day programme at Ananda in the Himalayas – the doctor’s consultation, the tailored meals, the slow recalibration of appetite – the hardest part tends to come at the airport, when the discipline of the place gets left behind with the mountain air. Ananda’s answer, released June 1, is a book. The Healing Plate is the retreat’s first cookbook, and its premise is straightforward: take the kitchen that has fed guests for a quarter-century and make it portable.
Ananda has spent 25 years as one of the more serious names in wellness travel, set on a 100-acre former palace estate above Rishikesh and the Ganges, in the Indian foothills widely cited as the birthplace of yoga and Ayurveda. Its reputation rests on clinical depth rather than spa fluff, with Ayurvedic consultations sitting alongside the yoga and meditation. The cookbook carries that same posture. It is less a collection of curries than a manual for eating according to Ayurvedic logic, organized around eight concerns – digestion, energy, inflammation, immunity, detoxification, cognition, sleep and conscious consumption.
The organizing idea is personalization, and it is also the book’s most useful feature for anyone sceptical of one-size-fits-all wellness. Ayurveda sorts people into three constitutional types, or doshas, and The Healing Plate includes a self-assessment to help readers place themselves, then adapts its 100-plus recipes accordingly. The same dish can be adjusted for a different constitution or a different season, the latter drawn from the Ayurvedic concept of Ritucharya, which ties what you eat to the time of year. There is guidance, too, on food combinations.
Dr. Sreelal Sankar, the retreat’s head of Ayurveda, frames the logic plainly: “One approach to food cannot suit everyone, and wholesome ingredients don’t necessarily benefit all in the same way.” It is a reasonable corrective to a wellness market that tends to sell universal superfoods, and it gives the book a point of view beyond the recipes themselves.
The other current running through it is waste. The Healing Plate leans on the Ayurvedic principle that every part of an ingredient has use, which lands as a zero-waste approach without the moralizing the term often carries. That puts it in step with a broader shift in how restaurants and home cooks alike are rethinking what gets thrown out, though Ananda’s version comes by it through tradition rather than trend.
The book is available through the Ananda boutique and select Canadian retailers, like Indigo.