Why and how does vegetarianism exist?

I grew up vegetarian - which can mean a lot of different things in today’s society, but it means something very specific to me, and I think it ties into a lot of changes I’ve made in my life. I’m going to lay out all of them here, but I’ll start with the origin of my family’s vegetarianism.

My family on both mom and dad’s side are Telugu Brahmins. South Indian brahmins tend to adhere to a particular faith: Smartism. Smartas almost certainly emerged from a synthesis between Vedic traditions and non-Vedic ones such as Jainism and Buddhism. The habits of the Jain and Buddhist monks became the standards by which the householding (read: they fuck and procreate) priestly class were judged as well. This particular class of Brahmins then began to imitate the Jain and Buddhist vegetarian practices as a way of keeping the faith of their followers - a way of showing that they were indeed removed from the world and worldly passions.

But why was this necessary? The theory I like is that the warrior classes and merchant classes needed a way to establish a relationship with each other that wasn’t zero-sum. Warrior groups need money and the merchant groups want to spend as little of it as possible - the rise of this third group, as intermediaries of the exchange of material goods was necessary for harmony. It was very important this group renounce two things: wealth and martial practice. That way, they were trusted by both sides. The vegetarian diet advertised many things - one of them being that you did not invest in long-lasting protein-based supply chains, that you did not know or care for the practices of animal husbandry, which were vital weapons in war - both in terms of horse-rearing and the tactics required to marshal armies.

From my reading, most of history’s intentional vegetarians were Hindus - and this almost certainly has something to do with climate. Vegetarian food keeps you naturally a bit cooler, while meat warms you up. In the barren north, it is much, much harder to get all your vitamins from the fewer vegetables that grow. Meanwhile India sits on some of the largest biodiversity of human-edible vegetables in the world. There are countless Indian cultivars of chilis, squash, potatoes - and these all only arose in the past 400 years, after the Columbian exchange!

From my dad’s telling of his family’s relationship with the village - the Brahmin land was where animal sacrifices were conducted. This meant that the fertilizer used on the vegetables in his family’s plot of land were very much non-vegetarian. This gives us some insight into how brahmins in previous eras might have received nutrients that were usually found only in the animal world! But most importantly, I don’t think the people of the past were that honest. I think they’d sneak off and have some fried festival meat every so often, supplementing their diet with what little bits of vitamins they might have been missing. Additionally, modern agricultural practices mean that the nutritional profile of many of our grains, lentils and beans is very different. We wash, treat, store and process vegetables in such a way that it completely alters the chemistry of the dish we’re making. Cooking is not merely the process of ingredient addition and heating, there’s real chemical reactions that our ancestors figured out through experimentation. Those heuristics for making highly nutritious vegetarian food are completely upended in a world with globalized and refrigerated supply chains.

There have been other vegetarian practitioners in the world - there’s a Siberian cult that’s entirely vegan, the Seventh Day Adventists, Jains, Buddhist monks and a few notable individuals. But the vast majority of the world, including the vast majority of Telugus (some 99%) are omnivores. In fact, when I eat Telugu food with chicken and fish in it, I realize just how beautifully the tastes of our cuisine complement meat. Much of my mom’s cooking continues the culinary tradition of Telugu people, but the missing chicken and fish are substituted in creative ways. My pet theory is that the brahmins in villages across India were the canaries of agricultural failure. India’s monsoon system makes it very difficult to predict agricultural yield. The various festivals throughout the year were a time to showcase the different harvests, and the dishes that my mom cooks are intimately tied to the local agriculture of Andhra Pradesh. Often, the harvest festivals were places where the brahmins would eat in front of others - a very visible showcasing of which harvests were bountiful and which weren’t in the times before mass literacy.

My family’s vegetarianism is very, very strict. For the first 29 years of my life, I ate meat 3 times accidentally and 4 times on purpose. This is very different from those who will be vegetarian for 29 days and eat meat one day a month. Our strictness was, in retrospect, foolish and extremely harmful. We lived far away from the source of our traditions, in a new societal order that did not understand nor care about our values of self-extinguishing, where vegetables were grown to be mostly water and the weather was miserably cold. I cannot imagine a worse blunder, but we somehow made it through. I associate those years with immense misery for a lot of reasons, but not the least of which is that I had to keep myself starving sometimes until I could find a vegetarian meal, and it would often be tasteless and without nutrition. I grew to be 6’4” but I was weaker than all the boys and most of the girls. I was picked on and didn’t have the strength to fight, maybe because of the lack of protein in my diet or maybe because of the Gandhian philosophy that was attached to the vegetarianism.

I understand where a lot of this came from - India in 1947 was not a place filled with food. British colonial agricultural practices turned many farms into barren land either through cashcropping poppies to sell as opium in China or through extractive taxes. It would take decades and the brilliance of men like Norman Borlaug to really achieve full bellies in India. Maybe the only way to keep the country together and sane was for almost everyone to adapt an ethos of vegetarianism for a few decades.

But maybe that time is over? Maybe it’s time for India and Indians to grow a lot of meat, eat it, unleash the desires that are resident within the lower half of the body as the ayurvedic guidance says. The world has moved on from idolizing the life of the mind and we are finding new diseases that are a consequence of our depleted vegetables and carb-heavy lifestyle. Eat some meat. Do some violence.