Interviewer: Tell me, you talk about the spiritual and how we have neglected this with our emphasis on material things, but what place is there for the material things?
Prabhupāda: We are not neglecting material. Just like you are taking care of your body, I am also taking care of my body. But the difference is that I am not thinking that I am this body, but others, they are thinking that they are this body. That is the problem. Just like if you are taking service from your car, so you don't identify yourself with the car. But you take care of the car to take service from it.
Similarly, we are taking service from this body because we are living, so I must eat or I must sleep. It is not that we are not eating or not sleeping, but our eating is different from ordinary eating. We discriminate eating. We don't eat so many things. We simply eat things which may keep my body just fit for understanding and executing this mission of life. That's all.
Let's take for example we don't take meat, we don't take eggs, fish, we don't take liquor or any sorts of intoxicants, even up to the cigarette, coffee, tea, because we know these things are superfluous. Nobody learns to smoke from the beginning of life, but the child requires to eat something. That's a fact. But it doesn't require to smoke. So these are artificial things. So we have to minimize the non-necessary things.