यातयामं गतरसं पूति पर्युषितं च यत्।उच्छिष्टमपि चामेध्यं भोजनं तामसप्रियम्॥
yāta-yāmaṃ gata-rasaṃ pūti paryuṣitaṃ ca yatucchiṣṭam api cāmedhyaṃ bhojanaṃ tāmasa-priyam
Word by word
The verse says
Food that has stood too long, that has lost its taste, gone off, kept overnight, picked over or unclean - that is what the dull prefer.
In plain words
This one needs a guard rail before anything else, because it is easy to turn into a verse about poor people.
It is not. Somebody eating yesterday's food because there is nothing else is not in this verse at all. The subject is preference - what a person reaches for when there is a choice.
Tamas is the strand of heaviness. What it chooses is whatever asks the least: least effort, least attention, least care.
Where you've felt this · in family life
A plate from the day before yesterday sits in your fridge, and you keep moving it aside to get at other things. You are not going to eat it and you are not going to throw it out. Deciding either way would take about forty seconds. It has been there two days and it will probably be there tomorrow.
Going deeper
Preference is what this is about, and the difference between preference and necessity has to be held on to or the whole thing turns cruel.
Somebody eating old food because that is what there is has nothing to do with tamas. Hunger is not a strand of nature. What is being described is a person with options who reaches for the one that asks least of them.
The strand of heaviness does not want bad things. It wants cheap things - cheap in effort, cheap in attention. Staleness is only the clearest example, because food is the one place where not caring leaves a visible residue.
And the honest version of this in most lives is not rotten food. It is the evening that gets spent without being chosen, the conversation you half have, the room you have stopped seeing. Nothing goes wrong. It simply goes, and nobody picked it.