Veg and Non-Veg: Hazy Scientific Boundaries, Clear Caste Lines

By announcing on 28th September 2023 that their campus canteen had ‘reserved’ six tables to protect the fragile sensibilities of the vegetarians, the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay—a globally recognised 53-year-old ‘top rated leading’ technical university—sent a message to its approximately 13,000 students on campus and to society: that segregation—the official practice of keeping people apart based on gender, race, religion, or, of course, caste—was alive and well. They even threatened that any violation of this attempt to be ‘more inclusive of the (veg) minority’ would lead to penalties and strict action. This ‘minority’ was apparently traumatised by the sight and smells of meat and eggs, even leading to ‘health issues’.

The Ambedkar-Periyar-Phule Study Circle (APPSC), a student body at IIT-Bombay, along with other protesting students, registered their refusal to participate in this centuries-old casteist practice of food based segregation by consuming both meat and ‘veg’ food at these ‘reserved’ tables. IIT-Madras is also not new to the caste spotlight. In 2018, it demarcated separate entrances, utensils, and wash basins based on what food one ate or didn’t eat. 

Students who spend several years within these toxic spaces fall into one of two categories—one group is shamed and humiliated for their cultures and tradition and the other is infused with impunity to go out into the world and reinforce age-old prejudices.

Around the same time as the IIT-Bombay announcement in 2023, the well-known and ‘well-loved’ Sudha Murthy, who identifies as ‘simple’ and ‘pure vegetarian’, disclosed in public that one of her biggest fears was that the same spoon may have been used for vegetarian and non-vegetarian food, which apparently compels her to carry her own cutlery wherever she goes—a gesture that her own caste group not only understands but also rationalises and justifies.

These instances project vegetarians as simple and endearing folk who just want a few unencumbered spaces to have their food in peace—a seemingly innocuous request, ignoring the many other traditions that their vegetarianism is associated with, such as refusing to rent out houses to meat eaters, refusing to marry outside their vegetarian groups, and even rationalising the lynching and murder of meat eaters.

In policy and decision making spaces, vegetarians not only hold the power, but misuse it every day in a myriad of ways—economic boycotts, shutting down meat selling street vendors (without any form of monetary compensation), lynchings, cattle slaughter bans and resistance to eggs in the mid-day meal scheme of children in government institutions. This is the reality that the sanitised spoons of Sudha Murthy and vegetarian tables of the IITs hide.

Those who challenge these supposedly innocent preferences are labelled insensitive trouble makers, projected as selfish and self-centred people who are the ones actually being discriminatory. Meat eating itself is blamed for these apparent insensitivities. 

These exaggerated vegetarian fragilities around food are taken as practices limited to certain communities and not as a broad oppressive system which has at the other end communities whose food choices and practices are disrespected and controlled.

In September 2024, in a school in Amroha, Uttar Pradesh, a seven-year-old boy, Rihan Khan, and his parents were humiliated and abused. Avneesh Sharma, the principal, claimed on camera that the child had threatened to “convert other children to Islam by feeding them non-vegetarian food”. The little boy was locked up in a lab for five hours and possibly beaten; and, as a justification for the inhumane treatment meted out to her son, Sabra, his mother, was accused of not paying fees. The principal can be seen displaying the mean, vicious and evil face of the ‘pure vegetarian’—a school principal vs. a child, a sheer abuse of caste and religious power. He says that he would not teach students who bring non-vegetarian food to schools and who would demolish temples when they grow up. Sabra says that she has never packed non-vegetarian food for school lunch for any of her sons. This, by itself, should be a cause for concern that parents are opting for ‘veg’ foods ‘by choice’ in order to appease ‘vegetarian’ sentiments.

This is one of many examples of educational institutions that, instead of functioning as hubs of rational thinking, scientific temper, tolerance, diversity and fraternity, reinforce the exact opposite every day. In spite of there being no law or scientific basis to ban animal source food (ASF) in schools or public spaces, educational institutions create their own rules and laws, violating Constitutional mandates with impunity. Food imposition, propaganda and indoctrination have become the curricula, targeting all ASF other than milk.

‘Pure vegetarian’ is then nothing more than a violent tool to assert superiority and hegemony. It is neither kind, compassionate nor simple. It is nothing more than a thinly veiled façade for casteism masquerading as love for cattle and other sentient beings. 

Article 15 of the Indian Constitution explicitly prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth and states that no citizen shall be subject to any “disability, liability, restriction or condition with regard to access to shops, public restaurants, hotels and places of public entertainment, or the use of wells, tanks, bathing ghats, roads and places of public resort maintained wholly or partly out of state funds or dedicated to the use of the general public”. This obviously applies to educational institutions too, but the line seems to blur when it comes to management and faculty!

Animal source foods (ASF) are a group distinct from plant source foods (PSF) but share broad similarities within each group in terms of composition, absorption and effect on the human body. ASF include milk, meat, eggs, poultry, fish, birds, wild animals, and more; while foods comprising of cereals, millets, legumes, pulses, nuts, green leafy vegetables, tubers, fruits and vegetables are broadly classified as of plant origin.

PSF contain several important nutrients, but these may not always be the best in terms of nutritional quality. The presence of substances like lectins, fibre, phytates, tannins and oxalic acid in these foods reduce the digestibility, absorption and bioavailability (how much of the nutrient is available for the body to utilise) compared to ASF which have better bioavailability of important nutrients such as proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals. According to the World Health Organization, only ASF have the potential to provide enough calcium, iron and zinc for infants during complementary feeding. They also positively benefit birth weight. Because of policies that promote cereals at the cost of other food groups, Indian diets are often composed primarily of carbohydrates leading to deficiencies. 

Interestingly, milk and dairy, which are in composition ASF, are allowed entry into the hallowed spaces of the ‘pure vegetarian’. Milk consists, unlike what die hard ‘pyoor vegetarians’ might say, of fat globules emulsified with a water-based fluid, white blood cells and milk secreting cells. It is a source of highly bioavailable proteins and other vitamins, including Vitamin B12, fats and minerals similar to ASF which are absent in PSF. 

When told that milk and other dairy products are, scientifically speaking, ASF and therefore not ‘pure’ veg, vegetarians often have exaggerated meltdowns—like animal fat ghee. 

The classification of milk and its products as not just veg but ‘pure veg’ is not a harmless cultural practice. Whether milk is veg or not would not have really mattered if it wasn’t being used in the current polarising caste wars. Milk, an ASF, has been given pure status, allowed entry into temples, puja rooms, on spoons and tables while other ASF are treated as impure and the people who consume them are actively discriminated against and attacked. So on the one hand, well-off vegetarians are able to freely consume one kind of ASF, and on the other, they use this privilege to prevent consumption of all other ASF by other people—the mid-day meal is already reeling under all kinds of casteist impositions including children being prevented from consuming eggs, where people are killed and attacked for their food choices, where economic boycotts based on religion and caste are common and where the law is used as a weapon against meat eaters not just in public spaces but also in private, and policy makers push cheap cereal based vegetarianism on large sections of the population through social security schemes such as the Public Distribution System (PDS), Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme and the Mid-Day Meal Scheme (MDMS). The only ones benefiting off this scheme of things are the well-off vegetarians with caste and class privilege. Further, they attribute many other beneficial attributes—such as being better, more meritorious and ‘upper’ caste—to this fake vegetarian identity. This has caused significant harm to the psyche and morality of many in the country.

That India is a vegetarian country is a myth that has been spewed ad nauseum. With its dhoklas, idli vadas, anna sambars and chole bhatures, India has been positioned as a vegetarian (and, of late, vegan) haven, erasing all other culinary delicacies of animal origin (apart from the ‘pure’ milk). 

Westerners, including billionaires such as those on the EAT-Lancet Commission on food, planet, and health have been raving over India’s vegetarianism as a model for the rest of the world, in spite of Indian diets being deficient in several nutrients best obtained from ASF.

Interestingly, the release of this Commission’s report in 2019 was facilitated by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI). The report is clear that its focus is to increase the consumption of PSF and substantially reduce the consumption of ASF. The discussion further targets red meats, with adolescents consuming the mid-day meal in India being specific targets: “We have to GET to the adolescents. We have to ‘shape’ their diets.” 

Professor Johan Rockstrom, who addressed this august gathering of policy makers at the release of the EAT Lancet report, emphasised that India can show the world how traditional diets, high in seeds, nuts, vegetables, whole grains and legumes, can provide sustainable nutrition without wrecking the planet, while his fellow white man, Lawrence Haddad of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), claimed that “if we can make [EAT Lancet] happen in India, we can make it happen anywhere in the world”. 

India, with its anemic, stunted, underweight, and otherwise deficient population, is apparently, the country that the world should look up to for leadership in food practices! Livestock and poultry which offer crucial nutritional and economic lifelines to small farmers, pastoral communities and households, particularly during crisis, are concertedly targeted. Between GAIN and FSSAI, there has also been alarming promotion of universal food fortification, with little acknowledgement of adverse consequences.

Natarajan and Jacob have debunked this myth of Indian vegetarianism. Not only do they suggest that no more than 30%, (closer to 20% Indians) are actually vegetarian, but that almost 15% (180 million) Indians consume beef. They argue that media, community associations and vigilante groups interfere with what people eat, as do legislators who make laws on the premise of Indian vegetarianism while stigmatizing and criminalizing beef eating.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) guiding principles for feeding children, meat, poultry, fish or eggs should be eaten daily, or as often as possible. The WHO found that children who consume eggs and flesh foods have higher intake of various nutrients important for optimal linear growth. The guiding principles state that, “consuming eggs is associated with increased intakes of energy, protein, essential fatty acids, vitamin B12, vitamin D, phosphorus and selenium, and with higher recumbent length. Introduction of meat as an early complementary food for breastfed infants was associated with improved protein and zinc intake.” The body requires proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, fats and many other nutrients which are present in varying proportions in a wide range of foodstuffs of animal and plant origin—broadly classified as cereals and millets; pulses and legumes; nuts and oilseeds; fruits and vegetables; meat, fish, poultry and eggs; milk and milk products; and fats and oils. 

The Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey (CNNS) 2016-18 found that barely 21% of children (6-23 months) had received an adequately diverse diet, only 6% had received a minimum acceptable diet and just 9% had received iron rich foods. The WHO found that there is evidence of “low prevalence of egg and flesh food intake across many countries.” Although a majority of Indians identify as meat eaters, economic, social, cultural, caste and political barriers do not allow them to eat as much ASF as they would like to. In most states of the country, the most commonly consumed food group (>85%) among school-age children and adolescents is cereals, while the least consumed (<5%) are eggs, fish, chicken or meat. It is important to compare the vegetarian plates of the rich with those being pushed on the poor. While one plate would be diverse with dairy, nuts, sprouts, vegetables, pulses and legumes, the latter would have just cereals and millets with a small side helping from other food groups. 

The caste and corporate nexus that currently has its stronghold on the country must be challenged as Indian vegetarianism adversely affects the nutrition of the population, particularly its most vulnerable. When mythology, ideology and caste-based hierarchies are the primary drivers of decisions around food, rather than science and the Constitution, the consequences are serious.