India has lost the crown for the sport of demonising the other by denouncing their dietary preferences as disgusting. In his only joust with Kamala Harris in the course of the US election, in the presidential debate on Wednesday, Donald Trump lowered the bar all the way on using food habits to render the other unpalatable. The new standard is eating dogs and cats, which the former US president has accused immigrants from Haiti of doing.
Trump said immigrants are dognapping and catnapping pets of the gentle people of Springfield, Ohio, for nutritional purposes. While poll analysts marvel at the ease with which Harris lured her opponent into a trap in the debate just by poking the old reprobate’s ego, we Indians, who take an unhealthy interest in the food habits of others, must marvel at the audacity of Trump’s kutta-billi agitprop. The gaurakshaks in the heartland must be feeling outclassed. They can only fight their wars over beef, a staple in many parts of the world, and the default source of protein for Indian communities low on the traditional totem pole.
If the people of Haiti are guilty as accused, their homeland should not have a stray dog menace. But a quick web search reveals that Haiti has one at least as serious as India’s. The strays even look like our own, complete with the legendary curled tail that can’t be straightened. Haiti’s stray cats don’t seem to have been counted. Cats are hard to count. They’re shape-shifters. That is their joy and glory.
The cat-and-dog story may have cost Trump the election but usually, since most communities have food taboos, allegations about food habits can be reliably used to other people of different communities. It’s worked very well in India, where food taboos and associations with class and caste are etched in primordial stone. Fact-checkers have been working for years to show that most of India is not vegetarian, but they haven’t succeeded.
We are used to living in grey areas. Vegetarian families have prodigal sons who are happy to eat meat outside but would not dream of letting it pollute the kitchen. And at weddings in strictly-vegetarian families you shall find their spacious homes and grounds beautifully illuminated, except for one tree left significantly in darkness. Beneath that tree, you shall find banned proteins and fluids that lift the animal spirits. Such grey areas and class divides are so pervasive that they have even inspired modern fiction: the ever-rebellious Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Revenge of the Non-vegetarian.
But in other parts of the world, which know nothing of the delights of the steel frame of the caste system, the class associations of diet have changed constantly. Low-class foods have swarmed up the ladder of high society. Cookbooks do their best to conceal this embarrassment. For instance, oysters were working class fare in the Roman empire and a staple in New York in its early years, but are now restricted to fine dining.
Onion soup used to be peasant food. In Saxon times, onions and shallots were the most common vegetables in Britain. Today, we regard them not as veggies but club them with garlic as providers of the high gustatory notes. But back in the day, when the Saxon materfamilias uttered the dreadful sentence that every family hates—“And now we must have our vegetables”—she usually meant onion soup.
But in modern English menus, onion soup is prefixed by the word ‘French’. It’s a device that dates back to the Norman Conquest, when William of Orange set the bar and the French were slavishly emulated as the fountainhead of high fashion, exactly like Milan is followed now. Romance words like ‘pork’ and ‘beef’ (boeuf) began to be used for food, replacing English terms for animals like ‘pig’ and ‘cow’. In Ben Jonson’s 17th century play Bartholomew Fair, the heroine shocks by wishing “to eat of a pig”. It’s so raw. Something subversive seems to have been at work: one would have expected the word ‘pork’ to be used.
To return to onion soup, by the time PG Wodehouse engaged with it in Uncle Fred in the Springtime, the staple of centuries had become quality fast food. His character Ricky Gilpin, an aspiring poet of the upper class, wants to raise capital to start an onion soup bar, to cater to the famished and affluent hordes emerging from theatres on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue after shows every night. Then as now, it was hard to make a living in poetry. Knowing one’s onions helps.
Despite such fluctuations in the fortunes of food, demonising the other as savages because they do not follow majoritarian dietary practices remains a reliable right-wing strategy. It has been used successfully for a decade in the world’s most populous democracy. In August, a schoolboy was chased for 30 km and shot dead in Faridabad by cow vigilantes—in error. Days earlier, a migrant worker was beaten to death in Charkhi Dadri on the suspicion that he had eaten beef—which Indians do every day outside the well-named ‘cow belt’.
And now, the consumption of dogs and cats will help US citizens make up their mind about whom they want to make the most powerful individuals on earth. May they choose wisely.
(Views are personal)
(Tweets @pratik_k)
Pratik Kanjilal | For years, the author has been speaking easy to a surprisingly tolerant public
