Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India

by James Staples, K. Sivaramakrishnan (Foreword)

Bovine politics exposes fault lines within contemporary Indian society, where eating beef is simultaneously a violation of sacred taboos, an expression of marginalized identities, and a route to cosmopolitan sophistication. The recent rise of Hindu nationalism has further polarized traditional Dalits, Muslims, and Christians protest threats to their beef-eating heritage while Hindu fundamentalists rally against those who eat the sacred cow. Yet close observation of what people do and do not eat, the styles and contexts within which they do so, and the disparities between rhetoric and everyday action overturns this simplistic binary opposition.Understanding how a food can be implicated in riots, vigilante attacks, and even murders demands that we look beyond immediate politics to wider contexts. Drawing on decades of ethnographic research in South India, James Staples charts how cattle owners, brokers, butchers, cooks, and occasional beef eaters navigate the contemporary political and cultural climate. Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian offers a fine-grained exploration of the current situation, locating it within the wider anthropology of food and eating in the region and revealing critical aspects of what it is to be Indian in the early twenty-first century.

Genres: Food, Nonfiction, India

238 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 15, 2020

Reviews

[goodandbadomens · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a breath of fresh air when it comes to food politics and sociology. Though it is an anthropological and ethnographic account of the author's research in Andhra Pradesh, India, the writing style made it a much easier read than I expected. This book touched upon the ambivalence that comes with meat-eating and vegetarianism in 21st century India. Drawing from and building upon scholars like Appadurai, this book is an important addition that investigates the changes that come with the 21st century. For academics, and for those curious about food in the Indian subcontinent, this is a very interesting read.

[Nigel Jeffery · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his recent fine-grained ethnography Sacred Cows and Manchurian Chicken James Staples (2020) reveals the apparent contrariness of human thinking and behaviour in the context of the diverse discourses in India surrounding cow-protection on the one hand, and beef consumption on the other. Too often the debates around complex topics can quickly become polarised as the parties on the extremes adopt loud, dogmatic, absolute positions that silence a more nuanced discussion on the messier ground in the broader middle. Working in India from the 1990’s to 2013, Staples’ (2020, p. 6) stated aim is to achieve a ‘shift away from an unduly binary opposition’, between cow-protectionists and beef consumers, that he asserts one might see in mainstream media. Staples (2020, p. 19) achieves his aim by focussing in detail on ‘a large and amorphous group sandwiched between the two dominant [….] groups’. However, as a consequence, whilst the views of some activists intent on beef consumption as a form of protest are represented in the book, the views at the other extreme of cow-protection vigilantes, law-making politicians and law-enforcing policemen are only represented second-hand through the work of others and media reports (Staples, 2020, p. 116).
I know from my own personal experience as a philosophical vegetarian for forty years how easy it is for views on both sides of the meat-eating debate to become intransigent, belligerent, and simplistic. So, I commend Staples and his research assistant, Das, both long-term vegetarians, for engaging with the visceral topic of meat consumption that some might argue they were ill equipped to examine without undue bias. However, Staples does not shy away from engaging directly with local abattoirs and butchers, and I noted with some amusement that whilst doing research in one particular butcher’s shop Das did pause to ask Staples sardonically, ‘How did we come to be doing this?’ (2020, p. 30). If Staples (2020, p. 170) does have a personal view on his general subject, it seems not to entail any criticism of meat-eaters, whilst perhaps being more critical of the far right’s creation of a ‘non-Hindu “other”, as the enemy of Indian values’ and the ‘demonization of those on the wrong side of the equation’. Such a bias against political dogma is consistent with Staples’ own non-dogmatic conclusions.
Whilst this book focusses on a finite number of people in a specific locality within India, there are many valuable lessons to be drawn from this work that can be applied more widely. Given the relatively short beef supply-chain from ‘venerated animals into a sought-after foodstuff’, Staples (2020, p. 83) observes how his informants navigate ‘in the spaces between these shifts’, and I agree with Staples (2020, p. 93) that an analysis of the ‘work of actively not knowing’, which he observes in many of his informants, could be usefully applied more widely in exploring the apparent contrariness of human rationality when it comes to resolving complex subjects. As Sivaramakrishnan (2020, p. xi) observes, the value of Staples’ ethnography is to illustrate and illuminate the ‘self-doubt, complexity [and] contradiction’ intrinsically embedded in the discourse around complex issues and food choices in particular.



For millennia humans have characterised themselves as rational beings, often as a point of differentiation between human and nonhuman animals. However, the ability of humans to compartmentalise knowledge, thereby creating cognitive dissonance, has been recognised elsewhere; generally, for example, by Hugo Mercier (2017) in The Enigma of Reason and, specifically within the context of meat consumption, by Melanie Joy (2010) in Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows.
Mercier (2017, pp. 328-334) argues that reason is not what we think it is. He observes that normatively we think we are capable of weighing up all the facts associated with a problem in order to arrive at a “valid” conclusion upon which to base a “rational” decision; he argues, however, that in practice the decision is made intuitively and the reasons are applied retrospectively in order to justify it socially. It is possible to see glimmers of this process unfolding in the replies of some of Staples’ informants. For example one of his beef-eating informants observed, ‘Yes it’s wrong to kill, and if we shouldn’t kill a cow, then we shouldn’t kill a chicken either, but we do. So no, the government is wrong to try to stop [cattle slaughter]. People need to eat.’ (Staples, 2020, p. 113). Any under-lying moral scruples this informant might have held surrounding the killing of animals for food were overcome by their personal interpretation of human necessity. Melanie Joy’s (2010, pp. 96-113) exploration of the psychological compartmentalization required to enable many people in Western society to ‘love dogs, eat pigs and wear cows’, identifies ‘Necessity’ as one of the three Ns often cited by meat-eaters to justify their food choices, the other two being ‘Normal and Natural’; a fourth N, ‘Nice’, was subsequently added by Jared Piazza et al (2015). Staples’ (2020, p. 52) work highlights ‘the importance of meat in both material and symbolic senses, to those who eat it’ and many of his informants corroborate Piazza’s finding that taste and texture are important factors in the choice to eat meat. Furthermore, in the section ‘Of Knowing and Not Knowing’, Staples (2020, p. 93) highlights ‘the work that various actors do, in different ways, to avoid, subvert, bracket, or deny knowledge of activity and meanings […] along the cattle-to-meat chain’; through their behaviour, Staples’ informants would appear to succinctly corroborate Joy’s theories.
In her study of ‘Meat-eating and vegetarianism in South-East London’ Anna Willetts (1997, p. 114) also highlights the apparent messiness of human thinking and behaviour, arguing that ‘generalisations, though useful analytical devices, all too often fail to account for everyday practice’. Although Willets is working in a different context, her research in London to ‘deconstruct the model that positions meat-eating and vegetarianism as oppositional’ shares many parallels with Staples’ work in India. Willets (1997, p. 114) argues that stereotypically ‘meat-eating […] is read as the ultimate expression of domination’, and ‘vegetarianism is seen to valorise a biocentric attitude to the environment’; and yet she observes that her meat-eating and vegetarian informants ‘share many similar views on health, animal rights, factory farming and environmental issues’. This observation resonates with Staples’ (2020, p. 110) conclusion that ‘when we connect together the fragments of knowledge through which the beef trade operates, […] there is not a radical distinction between the practices of high-caste Hindu cattle lovers on the one hand and beef-eating Christians, Dalits and Muslims on the other’. Willetts (1997, p. 128) concludes, ‘While food choice is a fundamental component of individual identity, questions of identity cannot be reduced to the presence or absence of meat in the diet’. I agree with both of these statements; individual identity is not so simplistic, but apparently messy decisions about eating meat, or not eating meat, may well be sending important signals, such as an expression of different world views, which should be respected.
Staples’ research in India was conducted over many years which allowed him to observe changes in the habits and beliefs of his informants, and his work draws our attention to an essential characteristic of reality, namely that nothing stays the same forever and everything changes. This state of universal impermanence is another essential component part of the apparent contrariness of human rationality. In this context, the effect that differing time-frames have on the perception of change is worth noting. Staples' informants are living in their own present day to day time, possibly unaware that their personal habits are, as he observes ethnographically, changing from one decade to the next. In democratic states, such as India, political time-frames are generally governed by the election cycle and the need to secure more votes than the opposition. Staples’ (2020, p. 101) analysis sheds light on how political parties can weaponise food ideologies for their own short-term gain by interpreting ancient religious traditions to suit their needs to ensure that, ‘Muslims, Dalits and Christians remain aware that they are “other”’. With decades of research data in a particular area, Staples’ ethnographic time is able to transcend both the day to day time of his informants and the political time of the election cycle, in order to identify changes that might otherwise go un-noticed. But the time of cultural tradition stretches well beyond all of the above, and Staples (2020, pp. 34-52) identifies how differing interpretations of the ancient Vedic traditions from thousands of years ago, and India’s colonial and post-colonial history from the last few hundred years, have both been used and misused in order to affect the narrative of changes in habits and beliefs regarding beef consumption.
Finally, there is environmental time which is normally measured in billions of years; however, in the current era of the Anthropocene, environmental change seems to have been accelerated somewhat. Surprisingly, Staples (2020, p. 135) does not mention man-made climate change at all, and he wonders if environmentalism might be seen as ‘the concern of educated and economically secure elites’; as more and more people are impacted by adverse climate events I wonder if his view has now changed, and Sivaramakrishnan’s foreword (2020, p. ix) redresses Staples’ omission, when he observes how climate change has put food, and meat in particular, firmly in the public spotlight as a potential source of environmental degradation. Staples (2020, p. 137) does address other health and environmental issues, and his informants are evidently worried by the dangers posed by the industrialization of the food system and the risk to human health posed by, inter alia, zoonotic diseases such as air-borne viruses from intensive chicken farms. Given the latest pandemic caused by a virulent zoonotic disease, Covid-19, we all have cause to worry.
Staples’ (2020, p. 177) research also explores the often messy relationship between caste and its religious context on the one hand, and the secular concept of class on the other, concluding that a more inclusive approach will require ‘a shift away from linear high-to-low scales of social differentiation to think about other, different kinds of formulation’. In his work ‘Buddhist Vegetarian Restaurants and the Changing Meanings of Meat in Urban China’, Jakob Klein (2017, p. 11) explores how ‘middle-class projects of self-cultivation’, Buddhist teaching, health and environmental discourses around vegetarianism and meat-eating are taking place in China ‘despite the pro-meat ideologies of modern Chinese states’. Once again, in a different context, there are parallels with Staples’ and Willetts’ research, as Klein’s (2017, p. 14) informants reveal complex thoughts that resist simplistic categorisation, such as “vegetarian” or “Buddhist” or “meat-eater”, and yet many views expressed seem to be signalling a general direction of travel away from ‘wastefulness and indulgence’ towards a more compassionate world view perhaps reflecting ‘a long-standing Chinese unease about excessive meat eating’. Whereas some of Staples’ (2020, p. 40) informants may have been influenced in different ways by ancient Vedic traditions and notions such as ahimsa (avoiding harm), Klein’s (2017, p. 8) informants draw upon ancient Buddhist traditions and notions such as ‘“the protection of life” (husheng)’, often interpreting the teaching in their own way, so that, in a Derridian sense, husheng can seemingly mean different things to different people in different contexts. Just as Staples observed how his informants navigated the spaces between shifts in the food chain to justify their own complicity in beef-eating, so Klein (2017, p. 1) observes how ‘Buddhist vegetarian restaurants provided spaces where people could share meat-free meals and discuss and develop their concerns about meat eating’. Different country, differing ideologies, and yet spaces and compartmentalization are evident in both scenarios.
Is there a direction of travel, as habits and beliefs in different contexts change towards eating meat? If there is, it is not a straight line and not without difficulties. Although Staples highlights the apparent contradictions between huge beef exports from India and the government’s support for cow-protection, he does not directly interrogate any politicians on this contradictory state of affairs; nor does he directly interrogate any of the corporate owners of large abattoirs, meat-processors and export businesses implicated by this trade; nor are the potentially violent vigilante cow-protectionist groups directly represented. Whilst Staples’ aim to give voice to the more blurred middle ground is laudable, I feel that an exploration of some of these apparently more extreme voices would, in time, be very useful, and may well reveal yet more examples of blurred lines and the contrariness of human rationality.



BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle, 1998. Politics. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
Joy, M., 2010. Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows. San Francisco: Conari Press.
Klein, J., 2017. Buddhist Vegetarian Restaurants and the Changing Meanings of Meat in Urban China. Consumer and Consumed: Humans and Animals in Globalising Food Systems, 82(2), pp. 252-276.
Mercier, H. & Sperber, D., 2017. The Enigma of Reason. London: Allen Lane.
Piazza, J. et al., 2015. Rationalizing meat consumption. The 4Ns. Appetite, 9 April, Volume 91, pp. 114-128.
Sivaramakrishnan, K., 2020. Foreword. In: Sacred Cows & Manchurian Chicken. Washington: University of Washington Press, pp. ix-xi.
Staples, J., 2020. Sacred Cows & Chicken Manchurian. Washington: University of Washington Press.
Willetts, A., 1997. 'Bacon sandwiches got the better of me'. In: P. Caplan, ed. Food, Health and Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 111-130.
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