History of the Sunday Feasts

The founder-acarya (spiritual master) of the Hare Krishna movement, Srila Prabhupada, started the now-famous Sunday feasts in 1966. At the first Krishna temple in the Western world, located in New York's Lower East Side, he would personally help cook the twelve-course meals. Regular attendance at the feast rapidly increased to three or four hundred people. Generally these feasts consisted of:

• puris - a light tortillalike whole wheat bread fried in ghee (clarified butter)
• pushpanna rice - an opulent rice dish, prepared with nuts and spices.
• samosas - a fried pastry stuffed with cauliflower and peas.
• pakoras - vegetables dipped in chick-pea batter and deep-fried in ghee
• two or more subjis - cooked vegetables, often including small cubes of fresh, homemade cheese.
• kheer - a dessert of sweetened condensed milk.
• burfi - a milk sweet resembling vanilla fudge.
• lassi - cooling yogurt-fruit drink

In 1967 Hare Krishna devotees opened their second temple, in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, where they served prasadam meals free to over 250 people daily. By the early 1970s, the ISKCON Sunday feast had been established as a weekly event in major cities throughout the world, including New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Mexico City, Montreal, London, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Nairobi, Calcutta, Bombay, Sydney, Melbourne, and Rio de Janeiro. Srila Prabhupada often light-heartedly referred to the Hare Krishna movement as "the kitchen religion," thus expressing his satisfaction with how well his followers were carrying out his desire to flood the world with prasadam.