In FERN’s latest story, published with Switchyard magazine as part of its special food issue, Siddhartha Deb delivers and intimate portrait of how beef has been used in India to define the social order, punish political opponents, and legitimize political power.
“Forty years later, my father is long dead, I am definitely not a Hindu, and I cook beef with relish,” Deb writes. “And yet, increasingly, I eat beef with a kind of double consciousness. Where once the meat was all about my rightful rebellion and gastronomic pleasure, it now trails with it other disturbing threads. Beef brings to mind the state of the planet, of a cataclysmic climate change precipitated further by our excessive consumption of meat, in particular beef. In New York, especially, where I am sometimes in the company of white people who are mostly vegan, my beef eating makes me feel like a barbarian, some kind of brown-skinned Trumpist who has shoved his way into polite society.
“But beef also reminds me that in today’s India, dominated entirely now by a Hindu-right government led by the prime minister Narendra Modi, eating beef, or possessing it, or desiring to eat it, is a sign of one’s inferiority, evidence that one is not Hindu, not really Indian, and perhaps not even fully human. Beef might be killing the planet, but in India, for reasons that have nothing to do with climate change or a balanced diet, beef can get a human being killed.”