Viśiṣṭādvaita

This reading gives special weight to sattva in the list meaning knowledge. The word sattva here points to the inner organ, the mind, but more precisely to the knowledge that is its effect, since scripture says 'from sattva is born knowledge.' Sattvic food is therefore valued above all as a cause of the growth of knowledge. The benefits are also worked out as a chain of cause: such foods are themselves the increasers of happiness at the time they ripen, and they increase contentment by setting going the action that leads to contentment.

Rāmānujācārya

Śuddhādvaita

This reading places the source of the food in the foreground rather than its physical qualities. The food is first listed by where it comes from: the giver of long life is the remnant of the seasonal sacrifice, the strengthener of sattva is the remnant left by the guru, the giver of strength the remnant of ancestors and gods, the giver of health that prepared by the mother, and so on. The six benefits follow precisely from this prior dedication, because the food has been drawn through the divine frame before reaching the eater. The savoury, oily, lasting, heart-pleasing qualities are then read as the natural fragrance of food that has first been offered. The devotee is being taught to see, in the most ordinary fact of eating, the very nourishment by which he is to read his own standing.

Śrī Puruṣottama

Dvaita

This reading carefully separates two words that might seem to overlap, priti (the love or pleasure of the very moment of eating) and hridya (the charm of the mind that persists afterward, once the tasting is over). It also resolves a puzzle in the word 'lasting': since foods are momentary and do not endure, how can they be called lasting? The answer is that 'lasting' here does not mean the food itself endures. The 'and' in the verse carries the sense of 'but,' setting aside the obvious meaning. Such foods are lasting in that, being freshly and fully cooked at the very time of eating rather than long before, they confer their good quality on the body for a long time. Clarified butter is given as an example of food that does not ripen at once.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Bhakti

This reading draws out the four sensory marks as a tight chain of exclusions, each adding a qualification the last still left open, and then insists on a further, unstated qualification: 'pure.' Even when a food has all four qualities of savouriness, smoothness, lastingness, and agreeableness, sattvic people are not seen to favor what is impure. So purity must be supplied here, the more so because the verse describing food dear to the tamasic explicitly uses the word 'impure.' The same source also reads the verse as a two-way test: such foods are dear to sattvic people, and only when they are dear to such people is their sattvic character to be known.

Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva

Modern

This reading foregrounds the moral and spiritual transformation that food works on character, citing the principle that purity of food brings purity of being. Because mind and reason are evolutes of nature, sattvic food gradually makes the inherent nature itself sattvic; the mind is literally formed from the subtle portion of the food, so as the food is, so is the mind. One source spells out the bodily mechanism: the seven elements of the body are formed from food, ideas in the mind correspond to these elements, and the mind takes on the constitution of what is eaten, as water takes the heat of the pot that holds it. Such food is therefore prescribed for the aspirant who seeks meditation, mental poise, and self-realization, with a concrete list of foods to take and impure foods to abandon.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak