The Sandspur

Issue date: 3/26/07 Section: Life & Times

It is not easy being a meat eater in India, the world center of vegetarianism.

With close to 200 million strict vegetarians and another half-billion people who only
rarely sample meat, India caters to vegetarians as the norm. Most supermarkets are vegetarian. So are many roadside restaurants, their signs touting "Veg," "Pure
Veg" or "100 Percent Vegetarian" cuisine. In India, it is meat eaters, not vegetarians, who must comb the menu to find something appealing, usually in the limited "non-veg" section at the bottom.

I am not a particularly devoted carnivore. I have at times gone months without eating
meat, largely because I was too lazy to make anything for dinner beyond a bowl of cereal. I also have spent much of my adult life
working in meat-loving regions of the world where being a vegetarian amounts to eating plates of rice and french fries and very
little else.

But I now have carnivorous children, raised in South Africa, where a unifying cultural feature across all races and ethnicities
is a love of grilled sausage and chops. India, for them, is a culinary puzzle.

At the local McDonald's, for instance, there is no beef. India's Hindu majority reveres the cow as a holy mother, so slaughter of
cattle is banned. Bacon is out as well because of India's significant Muslim minority. That leaves fish and chicken sandwiches, served up with egg-free mayonnaise. But the biggest selection at Mc-
Donald's is vegetarian: a McVeggie burger with its pea, carrot and potato patty; the McAloo Tika, a cousin of hash browns served up on a bun; and the Veg McCurry Pan, a mix of veggies in bread and egg-free bechamel sauce.

My small cheeseburger lovers, free balloons drooping in disappointed hands, opt to eat
just the French fries.

India's vegetarian sensibilities date back to about 500 B.C., when growing Buddhism and
Jainism - an off shoot of Hinduism that abhors any taking of life - began pushing the country's meat-eating early pastoralists off the cultural map.

Today, many Indian Hindus eschew meat eating as a drag on spiritual advancement, a potential karmic burden and simply cruel. Some Jains, the strictest of vegetarians, won't touch even carrots or onions for fear that insects or worms were harmed as the vegetables were pulled from the ground.

"Meat eating contributes to a mentality of violence, for with the chemically complex meat ingested one absorbs the slaughtered

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