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

248 Pages·2020·6.514 MB·English

by  James Staples

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, ecol ogy,
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 vari ous 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 pos si ble in part by a
grant from the Samuel and Althea Stroum Endowed Book Fund.
Copyright © 2020 by the University of Washington Press
Composed in Warnock Pro, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach
All photo graphs are by the author.
Cover design and illustrations by Stacy Wakefield
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
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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 rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2020006817
lC ebook rec ord 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

Contents
Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan ix
Acknowl edgments xiii
Introduction: Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian 3
ChaPter one
Differential Histories of Meat Eating in India 34
ChaPter tWo
Everyday South Indian Foodways 53
ChaPter three
From C attle Shed to Dinner Plate 77
ChaPter four
Cattle Slaughter, Beef Eating, and Ambivalence 102
ChaPter five
Health, the Environment, and the Rise of the Chicken 119
ChaPter six
From Caste to Class in Food 140
Conclusion: Taking on Sacred Cows 162
Glossary 181
Notes 187
References 201
Index 219

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 cleav-
ages created by poverty and prejudice. Paying attention to these issues,
James Staples focuses on the shifting practices, changing beliefs, and h uman
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 m iddle
classes eat and how they do so have been the basis for studying food and
culture at their vari ous points of intersection (Ray and Srinivas 2012a; Con-
lon 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 Eu rope, 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 prac ti tion ers yet often valo-
rized elsewhere in a romantic cele bration 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 de cades.
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 ordi-
nary village and urban interlocutors, from the quotidian vantage point of
ix