Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
outside the home … Though urban areas eat three-quarters of India's poultry meat, the
consumption of egg, fish and meat has gone up in rural homes … Chicken sells four
times as much as goat meat simply because it is cheaper. Pig meat sells much more
than goat meat does thanks to its lower cost … A persons' wallet decides his meat
preferences. A non-vegetarian Muslim Bangladeshi eats less meat per capita than a
partly vegetarian Indian because Bangladeshis are poorer.
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In other words, members of India's Hindu elite are rejecting its 2,000 year old dietary
obligations, and choosing a western diet, just as they are choosing to wear western clothes,
listen to western music, speak a western language, and adopt a western name when they
work in the call centre. The worry is that the beef that was once reserved for India's poor is
being replaced by goat meat for its wealthy.
Although Marvin Harris is observing from a western meat-eating perspective, and
Maneka Gandhi, 25 years later, from an Indian vegetarian perspective, their views and con-
clusions are similar. Gandhi, towards the end of her essay, states:
I do not think that India can be seen in terms of capitalists or communists, it is in-
stead a cowdung economy. If you take the cow or its cowdung away, we are done for.
We will die as a people. I say this knowing full well the scorn and ridicule that our de-
pendence on cattle attracts from the rest of the world … The Indian reverence for the
cow may seem like sentimentality but it is born from solid practical considerations. In
India all essentials are transported by road. The entire rural economy moves on four
legs. A government study estimated that draught animals saved us 780 billion rupees
on fuel and transport costs.
Harris rounds off his essay with an assessment of the energy efficiency of the Indian
cow-protection system:
In Singur district in West Bengal, Dr Odend'hal discovered that the cattle's gross
energetic efficency … was 17 per cent. This compares with less than four per cent
for American beef cattle raised on Western range land. As Odend'hal says, the high
efficiency of the Indian cattle complex comes about not because the animals are par-
ticularly productive, but because of scrupulous product utilization by humans.
And he concludes:
More calories go up in useless heat and smoke during a single day of traffic jams
in the United States than is wasted by all the cows of India during an entire year.
