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%.
