Lmao. These fucking goobers.
Most of India has been vegetarian for thousands of years. If meat was “essential”, they’d be dead.
Even most meat-eaters only eat it 1-2 times a week, if that. Very few people, throughout history, have consumed meat at levels anywhere close to what is considered acceptable in the world today. And in India eggs are a part of the “non-vegetarian” diet too.
I guess it’s literally just milk and milk products that are keeping 1.4 billion people alive by a thread. Just chugging gallons of cartons a day to get the “essential” nutrients.
India is not the best example to use here, 1 in 2 women are deficient in iron and 1 in 3 kids experience stunted growth as a result of malnutrition. It is why they are trying to fortify lots of foods like other countries have done to fight malnutrition. Sure people are surviving, but I wouldn’t call the current situation great.
That’s the whole point of this article by the UN, to look at malnutrition in developing countries like India and the potential causes.
India has very high levels of malnutrition among women and children. According to the Food Ministry, every second woman in the country is anaemic and every third child is stunted.
Fortification of food is considered to be one of the most suitable methods to combat malnutrition. Rice is one of India’s staple foods, consumed by about two-thirds of the population. Per capita rice consumption in India is 6.8 kg per month. Therefore, fortifying rice with micronutrients is an option to supplement the diet of the poor.
Yeah. No one is against fortification of food, here. India is suffering massively under its neoliberal government, which inherited the colonial-era policies of the British Raj. I can talk all day about the problems in India.
But there’s a reason I said “historically” and “thousands of years.” It was to show that you don’t need meat to live. People in India, before colonialism, lived just as well as people anywhere else without consuming huge amounts of meat.
The problems in India are not due to a lack of meat-consumption. It is due to colonialism and capitalism.
Before industrialisation but after the agricultural revolution people in general ate little meat.
It was to show that you don’t need meat to live. People in India, before colonialism, lived just as well as people anywhere else without consuming huge amounts of meat.
I think there probably was a lot of malnutrition in India, as well as every other country, before the introduction of greater caloric and nutrient intake from modern farming. Yes humans can live without those but it significantly raises child and infant mortality, women’s death rate, and generally unpleasant life. Meat and egg consumption did solve those problems to an extent, although it may not be sustainable. Regardless, I don’t think we can just go back to that diet. A new one is needed.
Most of India has been vegetarian for thousands of years. If meat was “essential”, they’d be dead.
I don’t know about “thousands of years” as in Vedic India meat was definitely consumed and animal sacrifices were performed for religious ceremonies:
In the time of the oldest Hindu sacred text, the Rig Veda (c. 1500 B.C.), cow meat was consumed. Like most cattle-breeding cultures, the Vedic Indians generally ate the castrated steers, but they would eat the female of the species during rituals or when welcoming a guest or a person of high status.
Ancient ritual texts known as Brahmanas (c. 900 B.C.) and other texts that taught religious duty (dharma), from the third century B.C., say that a bull or cow should be killed to be eaten when a guest arrives.
Even in modern day India the number of pure vegetarians doesn’t constitute the majority:
If you go by three large-scale government surveys, 23%-37% of Indians are estimated to be vegetarian. By itself this is nothing remarkably revelatory.
But new research by US-based anthropologist Balmurli Natrajan and India-based economist Suraj Jacob, points to a heap of evidence that even these are inflated estimations because of “cultural and political pressures”. So people under-report eating meat - particularly beef - and over-report eating vegetarian food.
Taking all this into account, say the researchers, only about 20% of Indians are actually vegetarian - much lower than common claims and stereotypes suggest.
Yeah, despite what Hindutva folks say, the Vedic religion isn’t modern Hinduism. For that you have to see the Bhakti movement but that’s a different point.
Conducting research like this is always very hard, but those numbers are hilariously wrong. But I’m not interested in debating over vegetarianism in Indian.
To go back to the main point, such data, even if taken at face value, always ignores the fact that most meat-eating Indians only consume a meat-based dish once a week or once a month. That percentage is rising with the newer generations but it’s still very low.
So if that little meat consumption is what is considered “essential” then the goal should be to tell Americans and Europeans, who can’t go one meal with it, to eat less meat.
But instead what you see (in India, China etc.) is meat being used almost as a status symbol. It’s the worst excesses of capitalism, that is literally unsustainable for the world, but is being excused and rationalised under the guise of “essential nutrients.”
It’s bullshit.
Conducting research like this is always very hard, but those numbers are hilariously wrong.
So what are the numbers then? All the sources I see place it below 50%.
