FOOTLOOSE FOOD - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 155

its slow-burning qualities making it particularly suitable for cooking. 'If India's wandering
bovines were fed fodder crops rather than straw or grass, their dung would be too liquid,
rendering it useless for fuel'. 30 Male calves are sold to hauliers or farmers who still require
fifty million or so of these tough, economical draught animals throughout India.
The matter of meat is more perplexing since the Hindu social system is founded on the
belief that cows are holy and should not be killed or eaten. Some cows are slaughtered com-
mercially and the beef sold to Muslims or Christians. But traditionally the meat derived
from animals that died a natural death, braxy as it is called in English, 31 was disposed of
and eaten by the lowest, poorest caste in Hindu society, the Untouchables. Nowadays the
Untouchables, call themselves Dalits (meaning 'downtrodden') and are still employed to
carry out the dirty work of civilization, like stripping off and diving into the sewers of Delhi
to remove obstructions. But initially they might have received some recompense for their
ostracism in the carcases discarded by their more pernickety betters.
The origins of cow worship, and of the Untouchables are only dimly visible in early
Hindu and Buddhist texts, but there is an agreeable logic in Marvin Harris' interpretation
which accords with earlier Hindu writings - documented at length in a recent book by D
N Jha entitled The Myth of the Sacred Cow - and provides the entire basis for the chapter
on the Holy Cow, in Rifkin's Beyond Beef . 32 The Aryan conquerors of Northern India, who
first arrived around 1800 BC, were herdsman from the steppes in search of grass, and they
were beef eaters. However, unlike their cousins who continued to advance westward, the
Aryans had turned into a blind alley, and with the Dravidian people occupying the Southern
end of the peninsula, soon found themselves boxed in. As the population grew, the pastor-
al diet of beef became increasingly unsustainable - a pressure upon land and a burden on
the poor. Beef eating became reserved for ritual sacrifices, of which, it can be assumed, the
members of the priestly Brahman caste were the main beneficiaries.
Some Indian scriptures corroborate the view that cow sacrifice and worship was a re-
sponse to ecological restraints. The Skandha Purana states that early in the Treta Yuga (the
second and most violent of the four world eras in the Hindu cosmology) the universe was
affiicted by severe famine:
The sages told the people in general that they could sacrifice animals to the Gods
and eat their remains, but only if they did so as a religious sacrifice and not merely for
personal survival. 'After this allowance was put in place' the Purana tells us, 'gods,
kings and men performed animal sacrifices and ate the meat that resulted from it.
Soon, however, the famine abated.' 33
But the pressure of population continued and in the five centuries before Christ, the
bovine sacrifices pontificated over by the Brahman priests came to seem increasingly ex-