Talking about food choices in India is fraught with danger. At one level, people can get lynched for their choices; while at another, any argument for a particular food choice can earn you the labels of a casteist or a bigot.
However, with a burgeoning population, the choices we make as a society about our food can impact the future of our country and humanity itself. It is a myth that India is a country of vegetarians. More than 70 percent of Indians consume meat and fish in one form or another.
However, the per capita consumption of meat in India is a fraction of that in the developed countries. While the per capita consumption of meat is around 130 kg per year in the US, Indians make do with just 3.9 kg per year.
Also, an average American consumes about 78 kg of milk, while an average Indian consumes only 36 kg in all forms. As the country progresses economically, this is bound to change. Imagine a scenario where corporate poultry, meat, and restaurant industries manage to convince Indians to imitate American food-consumption habits. With five times the population of the US, the amount of meat, dairy and eggs required to feed this consumption style would be mindboggling.
Industrial agriculture, poultry and meat industry are the most significant contributors to environmental pollution. One-third of the greenhouse emissions come from industrial agriculture. Around 36 percent of the world’s crop calories go towards animal feed, and another nine percent goes towards biofuels. In other words, cattle and poultry are consuming 36 percent of the food we produce. One cannot imagine a more inefficient way of feeding people. In terms of calories, feeding people through meat and poultry is one-tenth as efficient as eating crops directly.
Like the Vegan movement in the West, Indian vegetarianism also started as a rebel movement, albeit around 2,600 years ago. Buddhism and Jainism, which abhorred Vedic sacrifices that involved animals, propagated the concept of Ahimsa. Shunning meat formed a way of practising Ahimsa in everyday life. Later, Brahmins adopted vegetarianism and avoiding meat became a mark of caste purity for many. Thus a movement that was far ahead of its time and based on compassion, got twisted into conservatism and casteism and therefore shut down any debates or discussions on sustainable eating habits without invoking religion and rituals.
Many in the West have realised that the spectra of an environmental catastrophe and species extinction are looming large if the world continues to consume so much meat. They are moving towards a Vegan lifestyle.
Unfortunately, we are changing our traditional food habits for the worse at the worst possible time. The world population is racing to reach 900 crore in a few years. Around 50 percent of the world’s habitable land has been converted to farmland.
Of this, 33 percent is solely used for livestock feed productions. The above figures are with the present food consumption pattern.
Seventy percent of the grain grown in the US is consumed by cattle, chicken and pigs, which end up on the dinner table. The consumption of water for the meat industry is many times that of crop production.
Now, imagine India, with five times the US population, doing the same. Even at the cost of sounding like a bigot, one needs to question the sustainability of this suicidal way of life. Earth does not have the resources to make every Indian or Chinese eat like the American.
One way to extricate the food habits from the tangles of a caste debate is to endorse a Vegan lifestyle over the traditional Indian vegetarianism, which depends on milk products.
Take the cow out of the equation, and many more will be willing to listen. It is bizarre to think that humans need the milk of another species to survive.
After all, no other species drink the milk of another species. If a healthy and sustainable lifestyle has evolved over centuries, there is no need to throw it away just because it is associated with some religious belief or another. It would be better to add on such beliefs and move a step further by shunning dairy products and disentangle food from caste and religion.
Anand Neelakantan
mail@asura.co.in
Author of Asura, Ajaya series, Vanara and Bahubali trilogy