What we can eat: The prejudices

Songs of the Caged Panchhi

by

Bachchoo

North Korea — where nuclear tests are threatening and the dogs are nervous!” I have never eaten a dog, dear reader, but have eaten horse steak in Poland, crocodile in South Africa and wallaby in Australia. I confess to trying these exotic species out of pure curiosity in the diverse cuisines of the continents mentioned.

If I visited Korea or China and was offered cocker spaniel casserole, I’d refuse. I once had cocker spaniels as pets and though they weren’t my best friends I developed the sort of loving rapport with them which would make me queasy about eating any variety of their kin. Nevertheless a friend and famous Indian writer who spent time in China told a story about eating dog flesh there. He made the mischievous claim in the presence of another very famous writer who is a vegetarian and this caused a certain amount of outrage. Elaborating on the details of the anecdote would expose the identities of my friends — the dog-eater and the veggy — so I’ll stop.

After the outrage had subsided I did admit to the company that in my ill-spent youth I had a friend whose father owned an estate with a huge wooded acreage behind their city bungalow. My friends and I referred to it as “the jungle”. My friend’s father had appointed a person, who claimed to be an adivasi called Khadewaak, to be the caretaker of this heavy-foliaged, impenetrable plot and keep timber thieves and poachers away.

Khadewaak was, to our pre-teen gang, a fascinating character. He had built himself a shelter in “the jungle” and he fashioned stone-throwing catapults and bows which shot sharpened wooden darts with which he killed birds and other game. He would light fires and skin and cook the game for his food as we sat around and watched. The jungle was thick with creatures like mice with wings which he called “flying foxes”. They resembled bats but were furry and brown and he shot them for his food. We watched him cook them over campfires and were offered helpings of them in an almost ceremonial ritual.

I have recounted this eating of flying foxes to several people, not all of them vegetarians, who reacted with extreme revulsion, something I myself feel when people admit to eating dogs, cats or even non-domesticated rats. One man’s meat is another man’s poison. Religious sanctions which forbid Muslims and Jews to eat pork and Hindus to eat beef are understandable. Those of the faiths who choose not to eat this or that species are obviously free to obey these tenets.

In today’s world the injunctions against devouring a particular species go beyond religion. They are generated in some cases by pure revulsion and in others by ethical or conservationist concerns.

Iceland, for instance, exports 1,700 tonnes of whale meat in a single ship, throughout the year to Japan. The ships that carry this meat have to make four refuelling stops on the way and they are being met at each with protests against the killing and eating of whales. The protesters argue that whales are an endangered species and they are acting, sometimes out of sentiment against the death and dismemberment of these mammoths of the sea and mostly out of concerns for preserving the ecological balance of the oceans.

In Herman Melville’s classical account, Captain Ahab is driven by a mystical passion of revenge on Moby Dick. Today’s Icelandic whalers argue that in their climes humans have been eating whale meat from time immemorial and they ask: who are the eaters of beef and mutton and goat to object to their traditional source of sustenance

Despite the passion of the protesters, the countries that kill and eat whales have not passed laws against it and no one has been lynched or otherwise murdered for eating whale meat or allegedly keeping a kilo or two in a fridge.

While not being a dogmatic meat-eater, I admit that the arguments of dogmatic vegetarians are pretty forceful. Anyone who has seen the conditions and processes of mass slaughter in an abattoir should be revolted by the means by which the steak and chops reach the dinner plate. But then one puts these images out of mind as one does ideas of death when they occur when passing a graveyard.

A West Bengal MLA, a good friend, with a constituency bordering Bangladesh with a 73 per cent Muslim population has, out of personal convictions about constitutional freedom and only partially out of political expediency, has been opposed to the imposition of laws prohibiting the eating of beef. This friend (I am not revealing his/her gender) receives all manner of negative and threatening mail. One of the rather milder messages was in favour of imposing a blanket law of absolute vegetarianism. It suggested that those in favour of non-vegetarian diets should “switch off the lights and eat mooli — it tastes just like chicken lollipop!”

It was an intriguing communication and I tried its recommendation: I turned out the lights with a stick of horseradish in my hand which I bit into. Its texture was distinctly that of a vegetable and it tasted nothing like a leg of chicken. The experiment also made me wonder: how did he know Had the proselytising vegetarian stooped to tasting a “chicken lollipop”

Everywhere in the world the production of animal farming for human food and vegetable farming for the same have been and are huge industries. That humans eat other species may be a Darwinian law — survival of the fittest to indulgences of the fittest. Should the modern democratic state intervene in what we eat or drink Should a contentious religious tenet be enshrined in law Is not more Scotch consumed in Pakistan than in Scotland