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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26076 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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Forgive me my ignorance, but isn't India largely vegan/vegetarian?

The Indians I work with say its about 30%. Work has sent me to Hyderabad a couple of times, and a few other cities like Chennai and Delhi for shorter periods, and this % seems like its large enough that its much easier to actually be a vegetarian there. My coworkers there always just used the shortened term "veg", which was also the label used on menus and food packaging. My veg coworkers from the US always enjoyed being sent to Hyd for a while as you could reasonably expect effort to be put into the veg offerings almost everywhere, though we could all do without the heat and humidity of India in July/August, though Hyd seemed not as bad as some other cities. Also you can get beef in India if you really want to; ask the Muslims about it. You can generally identify them by their names in many cases I've found.

A common misconception, I'm afraid. I think it's somewhere around 20-40%. Vegans are as rare as teeth on a hen, Jains have their own weird dietary restrictions, they don't eat any vegetables that grow beneath the soil, so even potatoes and onions are verboten.

Most Indians eat meat, though the majority wouldn't have beef. Of course, when that large a proportion of the populace won't touch meat, the rest of us are forced to accommodate them.

It’s not uncommon, although it isn’t the majority, for native English speakers to use ‘meat’ to mean specifically beef and refer to chicken, sausage, ham, Turkey etc with the specific term. I’m wondering if that’s the origin of the confusion?

I occasionally see "meat" and "poultry" treated as separate categories, but mostly in older sources and even they seem to tacitly concede the two are closely related. I've never knowingly met anyone in person who thought it was an important distinction. This is the first I've ever heard of pork products not counting as "meat", though. Where do you see this usage?

My two cents from old cooking books - poultry was treated as inferior type of "meat". Many recipes had additional ingredients - such as bacon or ham or other "higher" level meats added to poultry in order for it to be considered a proper meat meal.

It is a very working class usage. I'm definitely willing to believe that it's a regionalism, but it seems like I've heard it used by Australians or English or something- maybe it's something that convergently evolves in regional dialects as a lower class colloquialism.

Is that more common in French, viande meaning meat but not chicken etc.

Is that thé origin? I had assumed it was an old French word for game meat or some such- I’m used to viande being a word for a meat without a specified name, viande de boeuf sounds nearly as strange as viande de poullard and I’d assume it was referring to bison meat or something.

I don't know what you guys are talking about, "Viande de boeuf, viande de poulet" is very common french.

It’s very unusual Cajun.

Maybe? I think it's unlikely, Westerners tend to have rather flanderized views of what it's like in India. We aren't all vegetarian sadhus chanting om while shitting on the street outside Taj Mahal.

Vegetarian. In India, they refer to normal foods as "non-veg", and it's a mirror image of vegetarians in the rest of the world.

Indians L O V E milk though.

Vegetarians still aren't a majority.

(And the majority of Indians are actually lactose intolerant, even if we love milk. Around 60% of the population, if a quick Google suffices)

Is this regional? I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in Mumbai and was surprised both at the commonality of ice cream/milk related shops, and how everything was vegetarian by default.

Yes. The more Aryan ancestry, the lower the rates, as you'd expect from descendants of pastoralist nomads.

The further south you go, the more pure the Dravidian ancestry. Mumbai is halfway in-between, and Maharashtra is an unusually strict vegetarian state.

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