Having divided faith three ways, chapter seventeen applies the same division to four ordinary areas of life, and the result is the most domestic passage in the Gita.
Food comes first. Those of clarity prefer food that is juicy, smooth, firm and pleasant, promoting life, vitality, strength, health and satisfaction. Those of energy want food that is bitter, sour, salty, very hot, pungent, dry and burning, producing pain, grief and sickness. Those of inertia take food that is stale, tasteless, putrid, left overnight and unfit for offering. A commentary on diet in a book about the battlefield seems like a detour until one notices the chapter's claim: the strands are legible in the most ordinary preferences a person has.
Sacrifice, austerity and giving follow the same pattern. Austerity is further divided by where it is exercised. Bodily austerity is reverence, purity, uprightness and non-injury. Austerity of speech is language that causes no distress, is truthful, agreeable and beneficial, together with the practice of recitation. Austerity of mind is calmness, gentleness, silence, self control and purity of being. Austerity performed for show, to gain honour or reverence, is placed with energy; austerity undertaken with self torture or to harm another is placed with inertia.
Giving is sorted by whether it is given because it should be, to a fitting recipient who cannot return it, or grudgingly and with expectation of return, or at the wrong place and time to an unworthy person without respect. The chapter closes with the three syllables used in the tradition to open and dedicate a religious act, and with the flat statement that anything offered without faith counts for nothing, here or hereafter.