Bumble Beef

When I was 19, I challenged myself to go without meat for two whole years (this does not include fish because a Bengali mom will flip if you say fish is non-vegetarian).

Street Food

Two things came off of this experiment. One: I realized that a diet without meat is tasty, can be sustained by seasoned kebab lovers and, well, isn’t the end of the world.
Second: a body genetically used to and structured congenitally to process animal protein does not process vegetable protein in the same way as the body of a traditional vegetarian and I landed myself into years of protein deficiency.

Essentially, you eat what suits your body and your palette.

So maybe, we should just about hang food supremacists.

This goes for crazed vegetarians, so-called-religious cow lovers, the pork lovers who only eat Kosher and for every other crazy loon who thinks it’s o.k. to impose their own food choice on me or you or anyone else.

The worse of the lot are the food loons that somehow end up becoming policy-makers. Aaaaaah the pain of having one of those ruling your country.

Apparently, food is more important than other religious code of conduct. You know, like when our scriptures say you can’t rape minors and rapists rape them anyway? These food loons don’t talk. Or that our scriptures talk about the value of honesty and tolerance, and these food loons kill others that don’t share their palette.

Honestly, when did India eradicate poverty and foeticide, child-birth deaths and epidemics to have the luxury of talking about food bans? Last I checked, India just got stripped buck naked by Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton for its flaky data collection tactics and inflating its growth rate.

We are a funny country.

We kill our own because we refuse to eat like the next person, when our cuisine changes every 200 kms and we celebrate that diversity. We spend more on defense in an attempt to “protect” ourselves from an imaginary enemy, nay keep the imaginary enemy alive, than we do on education and basic health combined.

We let rapists go scot-free when its a 20-year-old on a two-year-old, we take six years to decide if a terrorist caught in action is a terrorist or not, but when a man eats beef in his home on Bakri Eid, we take a mere 40 minutes to pull him off his feast, that by the way costs much less than vegetables and lentils in the country at the moment, and kill him before his parents.

So proud to be an Indian.