Ratri bhojan tyaga, the renunciation of eating after nightfall, forbids food and often water between sunset and sunrise. The stated reason is again nonviolence: insects drawn to a flame or invisible in the dark might be cooked into the food or swallowed with it, and the eye cannot verify at night what it can verify by day. Strict observers finish the evening meal well before dark and take nothing more until the following morning.
This daylight rule sits alongside a wider Jain culture of fasting that includes far more demanding observances, such as Ayambil, in which only a single bland, plain dish is eaten once a day for an extended period, and the practice of sallekhana, a voluntary and closely regulated fast unto death undertaken at the end of life by a small number of Jain ascetics and, rarely, lay Jains, under conditions the tradition considers spiritually exacting rather than casual. Alongside these, the dietary code sets the daily baseline: what an ordinary Jain household eats and when, on any day at all, rather than during a special observance.
Mendicants observe the strictest form of the whole code, eating only what is offered to them as alms, inspected and accepted according to detailed rules meant to ensure that no violence was done in preparing it and none is done in eating it.