Can we eat our way to a more tolerant society? https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/can-we-eat-our-way-to-a-more-tolerant-society-7509026/
Peter Ronald deSouza writes: Fanaticism often comes from the rigid rules we apply to food, with those who eat the food proscribed for us being viewed as the hostile other.
A person’s socialisation, within a family or community, into the rules concerning permitted and proscribed foods produces a mindset that translates into an attitude of either tolerance or intolerance. Food constructs the dietary other. This then morphs into the cultural other, soon becoming the political other, and further transforming into the hated other. Food in India produces political fanatics.
I am not referring to the sattvic, rajasic or tamasic categorisations which link food to gunas since their claims of certain foods producing happiness or indolence is a matter of scientific testing. I even do not have problems with foods that make health claims since all such propositions can be tested. My problem is with foods that acquire a status based on some religious text or cultural practice, the haram/halal foods, or the “hamare jati ke log yeh nahi khate hain” types.
I am not referring to the sattvic, rajasic or tamasic categorisations which link food to gunas since their claims of certain foods producing happiness or indolence is a matter of scientific testing. I even do not have problems with foods that make health claims since all such propositions can be tested. My problem is with foods that acquire a status based on some religious text or cultural practice, the haram/halal foods, or the “hamare jati ke log yeh nahi khate hain” types.
Diversity of food consumption is a good index of a tolerant society. That is why, I suspect, some people hate Lutyens Delhi.
If large numbers in India are willing to cross over and become food fusionistas, while loving their mother’s cooking no less then, I believe, we will be a more tolerant country.
Can we ignore food ethics in a discussion about food diversity and politics?
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/can-we-ignore-food-ethics-in-a-discussion-about-food-diversity-and-politics-7525762/ Mukund Padmanabhan writes: Allowing oneself to think critically and candidly about food may demand making challenging dietary changes.
While there is much to be said for outrightly condemning violent beef vigilantes or exposing the irrationality of specific food taboos, it is somewhat simplistic to draw up an unreserved case for food diversity, leave alone suggest, as he does, that it is “a good index of a tolerant society.”
at the high table of a true and thoroughgoing food libertarianism, as opposed to that populated with dishes catering to a moderate gastronomic adventurism, it is not enough to be seated (or share) such things as pork curries, beef frys, or mutton mince dosas. One would have to be fine with other more “unusual” dishes as well, such as raw monkey brain, rice wine infused with baby mice, dogs of various breeds, and sautéed tarantula. The people who consume them have as much a right to complain about food puritanism and othering as your everyday desi non-vegetarian.
What surprises me though, as a struggling and imperfect vegan, is how people react to veganism. Some believe it is a form of food puritanism, which it most definitely is not. Others dismiss it as a result of some passing woke trend, an attempt to be a food fashionista (as opposed to a deSouza-like “food fusionista”). Although there are some activists who have given veganism a bad name, very few appreciate that it could also be arrived at through deliberative philosophical inquiry into the ethics of food, its production and consumption.
The monstrous cruelties that attend industrial factory farming, which author Yuval Noah Harari described as probably the worst crime in history, need no repetition here.
Vegetarians like to think they are more humane about their dietary choices, but they rarely consider what goes into the making of dairy products. What it usually means is a long and quick succession of pregnancies for cows and buffalos, their calves separated not so long after birth, and their milk diverted for human consumption. If the calf is female, then it is raised for another succession of economically-lucrative pregnancies. If it’s a male, then it is usually quietly sent to the abattoir.
When it comes to thinking about how our food is produced, we would rather not know, or deal with our cognitive dissonances by suppressing what we do know. Allowing oneself to think critically and candidly about food may demand making challenging dietary changes
In an intellectual climate where prejudices on the basis of tribe, culture, nation, race, sex, and sexual preference have been rejected, Singer believes we are still struggling to overcome “speciesism”, a bias in favour of one’s own species over that of others. He argues, and disturbingly, that just like racists violate equality by privileging the interests of their own race and sexists violate equality by favouring their own sex, species-ists abuse the interests of members of other species.