Food is a source of vital substances that keeps humans or any other living beings alive. Broadly, food that human beings consume is divided into vegetarian food and non-vegetarian food. Some animals only eat vegetarian food unless forced by the human intervention, like the domestic dogs that are forced to eat milk and chapatis in India. Human beings eat all varieties of animals, but unlike the animals, they eat cooked food, or at least seasoned food. The history of food is interesting as the archaeological surveys demonstrated that the beef was the important food before the advent of Buddhism. Vegetarianism in India is post-Buddhist development. The beef was eaten by all the classes of the society, including the so-called Brahmins, but the Brahmins ate the best part of the cow and demanded the best part to eat. Brahmanism started as the mediating brokerage institute between the human mortals and immortals gods, which involved appeasing the Gods through the sacrifices, human and animal. Buddhism changed all this as Emperor Ashoka banned all forms of sacrifices. He went on to found the first hospitals for animals and banned animal killings in his own royal kitchen.

The Buddha emerged when the Ganges was a flourishing agricultural belt and the cows and bulls were important animals for the sustainable agri-culture. The Buddha did not encourage the killings of animals. He ate what was thrown into his alms bowl. When the counter-revolution began in India after Buddhist revolution, the counterrevolutionaries adopted and co-opted many of the elements of the Buddhist revolution: the preservation of cow was one of them, but this preservation was not exclusively reserved for the cows, it was extended to all that lives including human beings. The food based discrimination evolved as a part of caste-based discrimination. Killing or not killing is an ethical matter; it is not a culinary matter. Food is different depending on geographical locations. The belief systems have added the ethical dimension to the food habits which are contingent upon geography, economic status, and more importantly cultural roots of the community.

The food habits are not indicators of one’s moral character. Hitler was vegetarian if we have to judge people by what they eat.

As Babasaheb Ambedkar noted, the caste system is about discriminating on the basis of detailed attributes which also covers who eats what. The founders of Brahmin nationalism which is disguised as Hindu nationalism were very fond of justifying the caste system on the basis of “food chain”: the bigger fish eats the smaller one and so on. No doubt, India’s upper castes who are neurotically obsessed with physical purity and pollution (and are mentally deceased and impure with their mental attitude towards fellow human beings) have been ranking people on the basis of what they ate, or what they presumed the others ate. They even despised the compassionate Buddhists as the Svapak (dog-eating) lower castes. So among the Brahmins who later wrote the Gita as a justification for caste system talked about “Satvic food”. Now no food is purely satvik, all foods have different contents that are helpful for us to survive.

There is no food that purifies body or/and mind.

If it was so, people would just consume that and will become as pure as ceremonial purity can be. But the Brahmins obsessed with finding excuses to classify people as pure and impure came up with this scheme of “Satvik” food. The food must be judged by the nutrients they supply to us and people can eat different food depending on the nutrients they lack or need. So among the Brahmins there is competition: who is the purest Brahmins? So the Bhadralok Brahmins are less purer than their other ilk because they delight in fish. There was competition among the Brahmins as to who will take the vital of the cow which became a reverse competition as to who will leave the cow eating first. Among the Brahmins, there is a big hierarchy as to who is purer than the other. They can be obsessed with it, but when they impose and codify their obsession on others, it becomes a big social problem.

Can people be ranked socially on the basis of what people eat? The answer is plain No. We do not need any evidence for that. But let us follow the Brahminical scheme of ranking people based on the food habits.

At the top, the Brahmins boast of eating of purely “Satvik” food and hence boast of being “pure” vegetarians. The other backwards castes eat Mutton (Goat), Fish, and Chicken (MFC). The Dalits besides eating all of these also eats Beef and Pork. The Muslims eat MFC and Beef. One can see that even the animals are segregated. The Dalits, being the former Buddhists, have been the greatest lovers of life and they cherished and celebrated life. When the counterrevolution took place, they were forced to become beggars and paupers. The caste system imposed onto them forced them apart from the society and they were forced to live as scavengers and scavenge on the dead animals, prominently cows, the most populated domestic animal then. As the intelligent artisans, they quickly turn what came into their lot into an art of making various items from the hide of cows. They specialised in skinning the dead cows. Unlike recital of Brahmin mantras that needs no talent but fooling the masses with a promise of heaven, the work that India’s artisans did need much more pragmatism and scientific cultivation of mind. But the Jajmani system was conceived on the lines of castes that all the fruits of the labor of the lower caste went to Brahmins.

The present beef ban is the not about food habits, but mostly about imposing one’s belief system on others. It is a political way of polarising communities based on their food habits.

The four young people beat up in Una for skinning a dead cow, the murder of Akhlaq, and the recent lynching in Rajasthan are symptoms of the disease in the minds of the caste Hindus where they rank people on the basis of not only inhuman scriptural beliefs but also on the basis of food habits. The food is a secular affair. Who eats what is their personal matter. Even the state cannot legislate on it, but the archaic state that is deeply running India has the audacity to claim that they can legislate that.

Author – Mangesh Dhaiwale