Food first for the body or soul?

Swami Vivekananda said that you have to fill a hungry stomach before you can enlighten an ignorant soul. Since enlightenment is simply being connected to our innermost self and this connection is the sine-qua-non of controlling even hunger, I am wont to say that a man ought to be taught the principles of self-connection even before being fed. This is particularly so because what Swami Vivekananda said is being construed as conceding that we should take care of our material well-being before plunging into spiritualism, whereas what Swami Vivekananda was literally thinking of was the hungry masses of India who were totally impoverished, starving and slavish. Even to such a suffering mass of people, I would say that as you cook food for them, as they are eating, we ought to tell them to search for the more nourishing food within. Today, a 100 years later, a great majority of the starving masses of Swami Vivekananda’s times have moved away from the edg. They now have the bare minimum needed to survive and are poised to go beyond in the material realm, what with the surge to being a global power and all that. This much we can credit to India’s post-independent progress, even though it started of at a ridiculed ‘Hindu rate of growth’ pace. Therefore today, doubly so, food for the soul is even more urgently to be fed than food for the body.