Meat as Modern Medicine in Middle-Class India

This article explores increasing meat production and consumption in India. The reasons for the popularity of meat and the ways in which meat is produced and consumed among the growing middle-class groups of India are not well understood. The central research question concerns why and how the emerging middle class is becoming overwhelmingly nonvegetarian. My findings show that health/nutrition-related beliefs inform medicinal systems entangled with meat modernity that signifies health, nutrition, and modern lifestyles. I argue that meat consumption and nonvegetarianism are conditioned by, and themselves condition, meat modernity. My study shows that meat is often regarded as having therapeutic or medicinal value and that vegetarians are sometimes advised to eat meat by their doctors. Meat eating is not only recommended by doctors: fresh meat is often promoted as healthy and nutritious in the many hypermarkets that have opened in urban India. Study subjects used the term “health” to refer to Western scientific ideas about nutrition more often than concepts of spiritual or ritual pollution and purity. By empirically studying the complex and changing patterns of meat eating among the urban middle classes in India, this study contributes to an understanding of why and how dietary trends in the Global South are shifting toward meat eating.