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Who gets to decide what Indians should eat?
For public health doctor Dr Sylvia Karpagam, the answer has less to do with individual dietary choices and more to do with who holds power.
Speaking at the launch of her book The Meat of the Matter: How the Politics of Food Shapes Our Health here in Bengaluru on Tuesday, August 18, Sylvia questioned why foods such as eggs, fish, meat and other animal-sourced foods are often absent from conversations around public nutrition, while certain vegetarian foods are routinely presented as healthier or more appropriate.
“If you don’t eat something, that is completely fine. That is your choice. Why are you, as someone in power, abusing that power, erasing foods?” Sylvia argued, engaging in a discussion with Professor Vijeta Kumar at St Joseph’s University. “Because it is not what you say, it is also what you don't say,” she added.
Sylvia, who has worked on public health, nutrition, and food policy, said caste and privilege influence who gets to make decisions about food. She spoke about students who had been told by teachers that eating meat could affect their academic performance or brain development.
“The vegetarian says, ‘I just want one table in my corner to eat my pure-veg food. Why are you not giving it?’ But that is how segregation starts,” she said, while discussing how food-based segregation in schools and colleges can become normalised.
She said the issue was also one of representation. “You cannot have just vegetarians making food policies, which is what is happening now. You cannot have only vegetarians in the media, you cannot have only vegetarians as doctors, or researchers,” she asserted, stressing on the need for diversity in research spaces to avoid prejudice.
Sylvia’s book, published by HarperCollins India, looks at nutrition alongside the caste, religious, political, and economic factors that she argues influence food policies and public health programmes. It uses research and case studies alongside fictional stories. Sylvia said she rewrote the book several times because the first version was too dry. “I made at least four or five drafts of this book, and when I read the first draft, I myself fell asleep,” she said. Her younger son, she recalled, asked her, “How do you expect anyone to read this stuff?”
She said satire and fiction allowed her to write about difficult subjects without reproducing the dry style of conventional academic writing. “Putting it as fiction, I think, also gives us an outsider's view to see how bizarre this whole idea of discriminating against people and withholding nutritious food is,” she said.
The discussion also ventured into veganism. Sylvia posited that arguments for veganism generally fall into three categories: nutrition, animal rights, and climate change. She questioned whether veganism could be treated as an equally accessible choice for everyone. “Who can afford to be vegan? Who has the time? Who has the resources? Who has the supplements?” she asked.
She recalled visiting a garment factory where the supervisor told women workers that everything they needed to become vegan was available at a ration shop. “The only things available at a ration shop are rice and dal,” she said.
Sylvia also turned the spotlight on the stigma attached to certain foods. Recalling research she had participated in, Sylvia said women from tribal communities had been asked to sit outside while eating because people inside objected to the smell of their food. “We shouldn’t mock people who are ashamed of their food,” she said. “In fact, we should feel bad that we are in a society where people are not able to eat their own food without shame.”
Food in government schools, too, became a flashpoint for discussion. Sylvia’s comments came amid debates over midday meals in schools in West Bengal and Karnataka. In West Bengal, ISKCON began supplying cooked vegetarian mid-day meals to schools in Kolkata on August 1 under a pilot programme. Eggs continued to be provided separately through self help groups after criticism over the initial plan to have ISKCON provide the cooked meals.
In Karnataka, the Azim Premji Foundation is funding eggs on the four days for which the state did not previously provide them, taking egg provision to all six school days.
Speaking to TNM, Sylvia said that it was a “shame” that midday meals were being handled by a private organisation. “The government should be supporting it”. She attributed the expansion of egg provision to pressure from students, activists and civil society. “We had students, we had activists, we had civil society. So, I think that helped,” she said.
According to data sourced from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), a sizable population, 83.4% of men and 70.6% of women in the 15-49 age group, eat meat food daily, weekly or occasionally, per NFHS-5 (2019-21). Only four states, Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat, have less than 50% meat eaters. However, India is widely perceived as a predominantly vegetarian country. Vegetarianism is frequently treated as the culturally and morally orthodox choice. Sylvia said the people who dominate public conversations about food have a role in shaping that image.
“Because the people who are most vocal, occupying all these spaces, are the people who benefit from pushing that idea,” she said.
The Meat of the Matter: How the Politics of Food Shapes Our Health was released by HarperCollins India on August 18. The publisher describes the book as an examination of the politics of nutrition, including the role of caste, economics and communalism in shaping food policies and programmes.
This article was written by a student interning with TNM
