The Meat Ban: Between Guilt & Loathing?

 As someone who grew up in a vegetarian household, and took to eating meat only as a teenager, the idea of making do with vegetarian food for a few days does not fill me with horror. We were not staunch vegetarians, in that we could cook eggs once in a while- my mother would not participate, but the kitchen was made available to us, and forays into non-vegetarianism were not considered mortal sins. Even so, at heart one remains a vegetarian, and consequently can neither eat seafood, nor anything even mildly adventurous in terms of meat (that includes lamb), on account of the ‘non-veg’ smell.

 The idea of killing animals for the purpose of pleasure (for one doesn’t absolutely have to eat meat for sustenance) is admittedly a source of some moral discomfort and one deals with it by not thinking about it. However on occasions when the awareness of that reality cannot be artfully sidestepped, like for instance when one passes a tempo crammed with terrified chickens, screaming their heads off with every evolutionary instinct at their command at the fate that is to befall them, it is difficult not to wrestle with the question about the legitimacy of eating meat. There is something about animals that know that they that they are about to die, that particular note in the bleat, that speaks of the preciousness of their own lives to them, and which is matter-of-factly ignored by us, when we dig into their remains.

 It is a complex question, without any absolute answers. Humans have hunted and eaten animals since the beginning of time, so there is little historical basis for thinking of vegetarianism as an absolute moral imperative. Even hunting as a sport, has many champions, although the idea of killing defenseless creatures merely to prove the superiority of one’s equipment, should perhaps be one that is easier to be repulsed by. Even here, there are many who oppose hunting, but see nothing wrong with fishing, although, how exactly is it different is something that is not entirely clear. The Maharashtra government seems to agree – for it is able to argue that we don’t kill fish, we merely take them out of water. They then proceed to die. The trouble is, fish die with an obviousness that is difficult to misinterpret. They writhe about, they leap around in agony, they flip before finally flopping in death. But culturally, fishing is deemed legitimate- a relaxing sport, one that one can take a young child to.

 There are many such disparities- wearing fur is a modern sin, but farming imprisoned cattle industrially for meat is just business. And why does the slaying of a lion Cedric, cause more grief than any other endangered creature? Why do we care more about saving the tiger rather than say, the Griet bush frog, a species that is critically endangered? Why can we celebrate the eating of all kinds of exotic animals, but find the idea of eating dogs barbaric?

 Respect for life gets viewed through a cultural filter, and the hierarchy of human preferences has more to do with what cultures choose to privilege from time to time. It is always possible to find ways to justify what we need, sometimes by constructing arguments that are designed to win and at other times, by simply ignoring inconvenient truths. In this case, who gets to live and who doesn’t, whose departure is mourned, and whose is systematically planned, what gets eaten and what doesn’t- all these questions get culturally convenient answers.

 The current debates around meat bans have also similarly little to do with the respect for life and everything to do with issues of culture and power. Token support for a community, the implicit separation of the meat-eating ‘them’ and the vegetarian ‘us’, ignoring the fact that this an obviously flawed definition, the idea of maintaining purity in the face of cultural contaminants, these are all markers of cultural identity rather than universal humanity.

 To be vegetarian, not merely because one was born one, or because of some new fangled health movement aimed at reaffirming one’s firm belief in one’s own specialness, but because of a belief in the sanctity of living beings is an act of humanity. Not wishing to harm others is in effect not putting one’s life above that of any other living creature, to the extent possible. One could argue that is a misguided ideal, for there is no way that human beings can ensure that they do not cause harm to another living organism; indeed, all food sources are some form of life, but even if that is so, there are moral and ethical issues involved that could legitimately be contemplated at the level of the individual.

 The problem today is that the vegetarianism that is on display, is not cast in ideals of humanity that shape the thought of the very community that it purports to support. It is an aggressive intervention, that takes a refined moral ideal and converts into a blunt device to mark boundaries between people. It is rooted in loathing for the ‘other’ that is seen as an impure defiler. It legitimizes a particularly virulent form of self-righteousness, and represents a weaponised form of discrimination. Invoking purity in effect argues that meat-eating pollutes the cultural environment for the vegetarians. The ideal world for the vegetarian is by implication, one that does not contain non-vegetarians.

 To make food a cultural fault line is dangerous, given its essential nature. To disallow a certain kind of food in the name of sentiment has unlike the case of other freedoms like the right to expression, no other intention but to draw boundaries. To use vegetarianism as a sign of disdain is to distort everything that it stands for and turn what is potentially a complex moral dilemma into a lazy political gambit.

 (This piece has appeared in the Times of India)