CULTURE, PLACE, AND NATURE
Studies in Anthropology and Environment
K. Sivaramakrishnan, Series Editor
Centered in anthropology, the Culture, Place, and Nature series encompasses new interdisciplinary social science research on environmental issues, focusing on the intersection of culture, ecology, and politics in global, national, and local contexts. Contributors to the series view environmental knowledge and issues from the multiple and often conflicting perspectives of various cultural systems.
Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian
THE EVERYDAY POLITICS OF EATING MEAT IN INDIA
James Staples
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS
Seattle
Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian was made possible in part by a grant from the Samuel and Althea Stroum Endowed Book Fund.
Copyright © 2020 by the University of Washington Press
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All photographs are by the author.
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UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS
uwapress.uw.edu
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Staples, James, 1966– author.
Title: Sacred cows and chicken Manchurian : the everyday politics of eating meat in India / James Staples.
Description: Seattle : University of Washington Press, 2020. | Series: Culture, place, and nature | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020006817 (print) | LCCN 2020006818 (ebook) | ISBN 9780295747873 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780295747880 (paperback) | ISBN 9780295747897 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Food habits—India. | Meat industry and trade—Social aspects—India. | Meat—Religious aspects—Hinduism.
Classification: LCC GT2853.I5 S73 2020 (print) | LCC GT2853.I5 (ebook) | DDC 394.1/20954—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006817
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006818
The paper used in this publication is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.∞
In memory of M. Sambrajamma
FOREWORD
In this age of global climate change, food—its sources, production, and consumption—is arguably more consequentially connected to the fate of the environment than ever before. Food also reveals extreme forms of preference: hunted game for wealthy consumers, exotic meats smuggled internationally, and the rising tide of veganism in many parts of the world. Food, especially in the form of meat, can expose fundamental social cleavages created by poverty and prejudice. Paying attention to these issues, James Staples focuses on the shifting practices, changing beliefs, and human dilemmas that always inform food cultures and, within them, the place afforded to meat.
The anthropology of food has always been a rewarding terrain on which to explore social change, as a distinguished body of scholarship has long demonstrated (Goody 1982; Mintz 1996). Often, however, what urban middle classes eat and how they do so have been the basis for studying food and culture at their various points of intersection (Ray and Srinivas 2012a; Conlon 1995). And such an approach has often served well a broader study of modernity in all its variations and dynamism as it takes shape somewhere far from Europe, in places such as colonial or postcolonial South Asia. In contrast, famine foods, native diets, and coarse grains consumption among the rural poor are topics that have delineated nonmodern modes of eating that have been marginalized along with their practitioners yet often valorized elsewhere in a romantic celebration of their stewardship of nature.
Staples turns away from such overdrawn contrasts, to the basic questions through which social change has been studied in South Asia over decades. He returns to the relationship between caste and class, and the ways in which religious pluralism exists uneasily alongside state-sponsored secularism. In doing so, he offers insight into these big questions gleaned from his ordinary village and urban interlocutors, from the quotidian vantage point of food, particularly meat, and how it may define identities, values, and livelihoods. By paying attention to how and when people eat meat, and also how the food is procured, prepared, and presented, he unites minute examination of everyday foodways with broader concern with the political economy of beef, the intense contestation over its production and sale, and the deep ambivalence many people feel when, as it has in the last two decades, cow slaughter becomes a flashpoint for renewed tension across communities.
Long in gestation, the project is timely in its fruition. Its timeliness lies in confronting hyperbolic, very urban, and very public conflict around beef and meat industries. It offers a nuanced and thoughtful examination of practices and deliberations through which beef and meat are pragmatically encountered, experienced, and consumed in everyday contexts, away from the glare of the media and heated political rhetoric in cities. With awareness earned through decades of research in the same region, Staples notes that the politicization of beef has become more strident in recent years. Cow protection and veneration movements have a long legacy, dating at least to such activities in northern India in the colonial period (Pandey 1983; Gundimeda and Ashwin 2018). But, as he notes, they are resurgent in a violent form at a time when meat eating has increased exponentially and beef has become a polyvalent signifier of minority cultural defiance (for both Dalits and Christians) and of upward social mobility for many people across different faiths.
But this project is not about just food and faith, or meat and politics. Staples observes the dietary, technological, pricing, and medical factors that have shaped the food landscape and placed meat, including both chicken and beef, in new places in new ways: in the market, in the cuisine, and in the regulatory environment for food safety and export. His attention turns to factory food and novel forms of processing and vending that have shortened the distance between eating practices in the village and in the city. His patient fieldwork takes him to beef markets, including clandestine ones, and his interlocutors show him their awareness of health and environmental pollution issues associated with the consumption of red meat.
Staples takes deep interest in the self-doubt, complexity, contradiction, and willingness to adapt that ordinary beef eaters display and describe. It is this feature of this book that sets it apart from the other writing—often strident and polemical—that fails to discern and portray the social dynamism and shifting values or stakes of eaters of beef, its producers, and those who make political causes around beef cattle. Reification of categories such as beef eater and vegetarian has long limited cultural and sociological studies of food and identity in South Asia. India has witnessed a dramatic spread of food processing industries since the 1980s, the proliferation of fast food, and a newer, growing concern with food toxicity, diet and health, and organic agriculture. This has meant that in urban centers, surely, but also across rural India, a variety of factors and preferences have challenged ordinary people to be creative in identifying food with social rank, to link food and purity, and ultimately to use food to declare their sense of self.
Given the growing evidence that meat consumption and its large-scale industrial production is a serious cause of environmental degradation and a significant contributor to global climate change, some may be tempted to make