Part 1: The Plate and the People: Food Habits in India History: Fire Built Us
- Mahendra Rathod
- May 23
- 11 min read
The Plate and the People: Food Habits in India History - A Secret History of What India Really Eats
The trigger for this blog was embarrassingly simple.
I was abroad — at a business dinner in a European city — when a well-meaning colleague intercepted the menu and said, cheerfully: "He's Indian, just get him the vegetarian option."
I ate the vegetarian option. I said nothing. On the flight back, I found I couldn't stop thinking about it.
I am a Rathod. My family traces its lineage to Rajput warriors from Rajasthan — the same martial community for whom the shikar was not recreation but ritual: the hunt as a demonstration of courage, a masculine obligation, a way of feeding the household that also happened to be a display of who you were. Game, venison, wild boar — the Rajput table had never been a vegetarian one. Somewhere in the 19th century, our branch migrated to a small village called Charel in Gujarat, gave up the sword for the plough, lost most of what remained of the Rajputana inheritance, and became farmers. My grandfather tilled the land. Occasionally, there was mutton.
In the village, the arithmetic of social visibility is different from a town. Houses have space around them. Neighbours are not pressed against your wall. A lane does not carry sound and smell the way an urban street does. Our non-vegetarian cooking was not a furtive operation in a crowded neighbourhood — it was something simpler: a mutton, on an occasion, cooked quietly at the back of the house, shared within the family. No announcement. No explanation. Just a meal that happened and was not discussed.
Then we moved to a small town — and the arithmetic changed entirely. Houses pressed closer. Neighbours were visible from every window. Social life was conducted at a proximity that made everyone's business yours and yours everyone's. Non-vegetarian cooking now required planning. Sundays were the day. The smell was the liability — if it drifted to the wrong nose, there would be consequences: cooled relationships, lowered eyes, invitations that stopped coming, the specific social exclusion that small Indian towns wield with remarkable and silent precision. We cooked in something approaching secrecy, and ate quickly. The neighbours must not know.
Then came Sainik School Balachadi in Jamnagar — a military boarding school where the mess served eggs and omelettes at breakfast and, on Sundays, one katori of mutton curry per student. This was my first encounter with non-vegetarian food as something institutional, unremarkable, built into the weekly schedule by the state. It was also, unexpectedly, my first encounter with its social cost in a new form. Most of my classmates were Gujarati. For the first few years, being non-vegetarian placed me on the wrong side of a line I hadn't known was drawn in quite that way. Not aggressive disapproval — something quieter, more persistent. You learned which friendships could absorb the information, and which could not.
Then Baroda — cosmopolitan by Gujarat standards — where my first chicken burger arrived from a small laari near the hostel, eaten standing on a pavement, entirely without incident. A small moment. It felt larger than it was.
Then Bangalore, for an MBA at IIM-B. The mess served both vegetarian and non-vegetarian. Nobody made a fuss. My close circle included people from Mumbai, Kashmir, Delhi, Dehradun, Manipur, Jharkhand, Karnataka, and Tibet. All non-vegetarian. The ones from Manipur and Tibet were operating, by the standards of everyone else at the table, at a different altitude entirely — smoked pork appeared as a casual snack, the way someone from Gujarat might produce a mathri from a dabba. I stuck to chicken, egg, and the occasional prawn. We ate together every evening. It was never a thing.
After the MBA — Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Chennai — non-vegetarian food was everywhere, unremarkable, abundant. The Sunday secrecy of my small-town childhood felt like a story from another country. Which, in a sense, it was.
And then, somewhere abroad, a colleague ordered me a vegetarian meal because I was Indian.
I started reading. The more I read, the more I realised that the gap between what India actually eats and what the world thinks India eats is one of the great untold stories of the subcontinent.
The food habits in India's history are among the most misunderstood facts about any civilisation on earth. Seventy percent of Indians eat non-vegetarian food — fish, chicken, mutton, pork — regularly and without apology. The remaining thirty percent include communities whose vegetarianism is ancient, philosophically rigorous, and genuinely remarkable. Both stories are true. What is not true is the single story: that India is, was, or ever aspired to be a uniformly vegetarian nation. This series is the history of how that single story was built, who built it, and what the actual, messier, more interesting truth looks like underneath.
It hasn't. It never was. And the story of how that myth was built, and on whose behalf, and at what cost to everyone else, turns out to be 2 million years old, deeply political, and entirely fascinating.
This is my attempt to tell it.
"India is not what the world thinks it eats. And Indians are not what they think they eat."
This blog is the story of how that happened — and why it matters. It will take us back two million years, through five civilisations, four religions, three famines, two empires, and one very complicated subcontinent. Along the way we will meet everyone from Homo erectus to the Mughals to a nineteenth-century colonial bureaucrat who thought Indians ate too much rice.
We will not tell you what to eat. That is between you, your stomach, your god, and your grandmother. But we will tell you the truth about what India — and before India, humanity — has always eaten. And the truth, as it turns out, is considerably more interesting than the myth.
PART I
Fire, Meat, and the Making of Us
"Before India. Before religion. Before agriculture. There was the hunt."
Chapter 1: The Omnivore's Inheritance
Here is a fact that deserves to be on a bumper sticker: the human brain is the most metabolically expensive organ in the known universe, relative to body size. It accounts for 2% of your body weight and burns through 20% of your total daily energy. Keeping it running requires a reliable, dense, uninterrupted supply of calories — and calories, for most of human prehistory, came most efficiently from one place: cooked meat and cooked starch.
Let us go back to the actual beginning. Not the beginning of India, or Hinduism, or the Indus Valley Civilisation — those stories come later, and they are excellent. The actual beginning. About 1.8 million years ago, on the East African savanna, a hominid called Homo erectus did something that changed the trajectory of life on this planet. He — or quite possibly she; the fossil record is diplomatically quiet on gender — picked up a piece of meat, held it near a fire, and ate it.
This sounds underwhelming. It was, in fact, the most consequential dietary decision in the history of our species.
DID YOU KNOW? The earliest confirmed evidence of controlled fire use by hominids comes from Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa's Northern Cape, dated to approximately 1 million years ago. Researchers found microscopic fragments of burned bone and plant ash inside the cave. This is 994,000 years older than the first pizza, and arguably more significant. |
Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham spent decades studying what happened next and wrote a book about it called Catching Fire. His argument is audacious and, by now, well-supported by the fossil record: cooking didn't just change what we ate. Cooking built us. Cooked food — meat and starch in particular — delivers far more bioavailable calories per bite than raw food. More calories meant the brain could grow. A growing brain needed more calories still. The feedback loop ran for a million years and eventually produced you — with your 1,350cc brain, your opinions about food, and your entirely unique ability to feel guilty about what you eat.
The numbers are stark. Our ancestor Australopithecus, from 3 million years ago, had a brain of roughly 450cc — not much more than a large grapefruit. By the time Homo erectus arrived, with fire and cooked food, the brain had doubled to ~900cc. Modern humans sit at 1,350cc — three times the Australopithecus. The inflection point on that curve coincides almost exactly with the first evidence of regular cooking. Correlation is not causation, of course. But when the correlation is this clean, across 1.5 million years of fossil record, it tends to get scientists' attention.
The evidence doesn't stop at the skull. It continues inside your body, right now.
THE GUT ARGUMENT
Gorillas — who eat primarily leaves, fruit, and occasional bark — have a large intestine that represents roughly 55% of their total digestive tract. Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives and predominantly plant-eating primates, sit at about 52%. Humans? 17%. This matters enormously, because the large intestine is where fermentationhappens — where raw plant fibre gets slowly broken down by bacteria to extract nutrition. A longer large intestine signals a digestive system designed for raw, fibrous plant matter. A shorter one signals a system designed for food that has already been partly processed — by heat, by cooking, by fire.
THE TEETH
Carnivores — tigers, lions, wolves — have large, dagger-like canines for seizing prey and slicing flesh, and not much else. Herbivores — cows, horses, gorillas — have broad, flat molars for grinding plant matter, with canines that are largely decorative. Humans have both: modest canines (significantly smaller than our ape cousins') and broad molars for grinding grain and cooked starch. This is the dentition of an omnivore. Not a specialist. Something considerably more flexible — and more interesting
THE AMYLASE CLUE
There is one more piece of biological evidence worth a moment. The salivary amylase gene, AMY1, codes for an enzyme that begins breaking down starch in your mouth — it is why a piece of bread starts to taste faintly sweet if you chew it long enough. Humans carry three to six copies of the AMY1 gene. Chimpanzees carry two. We evolved extra copies specifically to process cooked starch — an adaptation that makes no biological sense unless cooked starch had been a major part of the human diet for an extremely long time.
DID YOU KNOW? Chimpanzees spend approximately 6 hours every day just chewing raw food — because raw plant material requires enormous processing time to yield calories. Cooking reduced this to roughly 1 hour for early humans. That freed up, at a rough calculation, 5 hours of daily time — which our ancestors used to develop language, build social structures, create art, and eventually write religious texts about what not to eat. |
None of this is a dietary prescription. The evolutionary environment of 1 million years ago is not the nutritional landscape of today, and what kept Homo erectus alive on the African savanna does not automatically translate into the optimal modern diet. But it establishes something fundamental: Homo sapiens arrived on this planet as a biological omnivore. Not a carnivore. Not a herbivore. An omnivore — flexible, adaptable, capable of surviving on a wider range of foods than almost any other large mammal on earth.
"The question was never whether humans could be vegetarian. Of course we can. The question is what shaped any particular group of humans to eat what they actually eat — and that story turns out to be about geography, economics, power, and religion, in roughly that order."
DID YOU KNOW? The Inuit of the Arctic traditionally ate a diet that was approximately 95% animal-based— seal, whale, caribou, fish — with virtually no plant food for months at a time. Early explorers and researchers noted historically low rates of cardiovascular disease in these communities. The likely reasons: the type of fat consumed (omega-3 rich), the complete absence of processed carbohydrates, and the extraordinary freshness of the food. Nature has very little interest in our dietary categories. |
Chapter 2: The World Eats — A Grand Tour
Why does every culture eat what it eats? The answer is almost never "choice."
If you want to understand why India eats what it eats, it helps to first look at what everyone else on earth has always eaten — and why. The answer, almost universally, is: whatever was locally available, reasonably affordable, and didn't kill you before you had children. Food culture is not, in the first instance, a philosophical choice. It is a geographic and economic one. Philosophy enters the picture considerably later, once you have enough surplus to afford being picky.
Three forces shape what any culture eats, in order of historical priority: geography(what is physically possible to produce), economics (what is affordable enough to eat regularly), and religion (what is permitted, forbidden, or socially required). In that order. Always in that order.
GEOGRAPHY FIRST
Consider Tibet and Mongolia. High altitude, brutal winters, minimal arable land, impossible to grow crops for most of the year. The traditional diet was almost entirely animal-based: yak meat, yak milk, dried mutton, fermented dairy. Buddhism arrived and complicated this philosophically, but the Himalayas remained completely unmoved by theology. The people of high-altitude Central Asia were not eating meat because they were spiritually inferior. They were eating meat because at 4,500 metres above sea level in January, there is simply nothing else.
At the other extreme, consider Argentina. The pampas — vast, flat, famously fertile grasslands — are essentially a natural cattle ranch of continental proportions. Argentines have historically consumed among the highest quantities of beef per capita anywhere on earth. This is not a cultural choice in any deep sense. It is geography expressed as dinner.
THEN ECONOMICS
In almost every pre-industrial society, meat was expensive, perishable, and high-status. Eating it regularly signalled wealth. Abstaining from it was either poverty (you couldn't afford it) or philosophy (you had renounced it). The vast majority of humanity — the peasant, the farmer, the labourer — ate meat rarely: at weddings, festivals, harvests, the slaughter of a surplus animal in winter. The rest of the year was grain, legumes, and whatever grew in the kitchen garden.
DID YOU KNOW? Archaeological excavations at Giza have found extensive butchery sites near the pyramid workers' settlement, with evidence of industrial-scale slaughter of cattle, sheep, and goats. The people who built the Great Pyramid were fed substantial quantities of meat as part of their rations. The Pharaoh did not send them lentils. This is confirmed by the Wadi al-Jarf papyri — the world's oldest known papyrus documents — which record food deliveries to pyramid workers including meat, bread, and beer. |
THEN RELIGION
Every major world religion has food rules. This is not a coincidence. Food rules serve several simultaneous functions: they create group identity (we eat this; they eat that), they establish social hierarchy (the priest eats differently from the farmer), they encode practical hygiene as sacred law (pork spoils rapidly in hot climates; shellfish carry risk without refrigeration), and they give religious institutions a daily point of intervention in ordinary life. You can ignore a sermon. You cannot ignore hunger.
THE WORD ITSELF
Before leaving the global picture, one historical footnote that reliably surprises people: the word "vegetarian" was coined in 1839 by British physician William Lambe and formally adopted by the Vegetarian Society of the United Kingdom in 1847. Before that, people who avoided meat were described as following a "Pythagorean diet" — after the Greek philosopher who, with characteristically eccentric logic, abstained from both meat and beans.
DID YOU KNOW? Pythagoras — the mathematician of the theorem you learned in school and almost certainly never used again — was one of history's most passionate advocates for not eating animals. He also refused to eat beans, for reasons that remain philosophically murky: competing theories attribute this to their resemblance to human embryos, a belief that the souls of the dead resided in them, or simply the flatulence problem. The Pythagorean diet was, in short, complicated. Ancient India had the concept of ahimsa. Ancient Greece had Pythagoras. The urge to have opinions about other people's food is apparently universal. |
The point is this: ancient India had the concept of ahimsa (non-harm). It had the term shakahari (plant-eater). But the global identity called "vegetarianism" — the movement, the label, the -ism — is less than 200 years old, invented in Victorian England. India provided the philosophy. Britain provided the branding.
ONE LAST CLUE — THE MILK QUESTION
About 65% of the world's adult population cannot properly digest lactose, the sugar in milk, because most mammals stop producing the lactase enzyme after infancy. The exceptions are populations with long histories of cattle herding: Northern Europeans, certain East African pastoralists, and — with significant variation across communities — many Indians.
India's relatively high lactase persistence is a genetic record written in DNA — evidence of how long Indians have kept cattle, and how central cattle were to the economy. What it does not tell you is what Indians were doing with those cattle. Milking them, certainly. Using them for draught work, certainly. But the archaeological record of the Indus Valley — to which we turn next — contains something else as well: cattle bones, cut-marked and burned.
The sacred cow, it turns out, had a considerably more complicated early life than the mythology suggests.
But that is Part II. And Part II is where the story gets genuinely interesting.
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