Your Worship Mayor James Nxumalo, ladies and gentlemen:

Today is a special day for members of the Hare Krsna Movement. It is the appearance day of an incarnation of the Lord called Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu. Generally we celebrate this day in our temples. But I was happy instead to accept your invitation to be present for this function in your village today. Our organization is happy to participate in efforts towards the social welfare of the South African people. Our unique contribution at such events is always the free distribution of vegetarian food. The Hare Krsna Movement runs the largest vegetarian food relief program in the world—called "Food for Life"—which has branches throughout the world and distributes a plate of free food every two seconds.

Our spiritual teacher, Srila Prabhupada, once instructed that no-one within twenty kilometers of a house of God should go hungry. For the last the thirty years, we have done our best here in Durban to not only follow that instruction, but to expand upon it. Hare Krsna devotees go into poor areas on a daily basis with vans packed full of delicious and nutritious food.

We often accompany the distribution of that food with the chanting of God's names to remind ourselves and others that food itself is God's mercy upon us. So often in modern times we take food for granted. But food is not produced in laboratories by scientists, nor is it some freak accident of material nature. God is the creator and maintainer of everything. Thus food is His mercy supplied to us through the medium of material nature. We must acknowledge this mercy, for if we receive a gift but do not express our gratitude in return, we can hardly expect our benefactor to continue to favor us.

In our movement we honor this principle of acknowledging mercy by first offering the food we eat or distribute to God, whom we call Krsna. Other religions do the same, although they may call God by different names. Giving thanks is a universal principle followed by all pious and intelligent men and women.

We call offered food 'prasadam' which simply means 'mercy'. The wonder of it all is that by eating food offered to God we not only nourish our bodies, but also nourish our souls. Thus the act of distributing such "soul food" gives social welfare a higher and more meaningful significance.

We very much enjoy conducting this service to the people of Durban and have plans for further expanding our already successful program. We know the nature of this world is such that there will always be poor and destitute people, and as long as the members of the Hare Krsna Movement find ourselves in a better position, we will always share our good fortune – our prasadam food – with others.

Hare Krsna and thank you.