Can vegetarianism save the world? I’m tempted to say yes, in light of our food crisis. One hundred and ten million people were driven into penury last year, 44 million of them went hungry most of the time, and an uncounted number, mostly women and children, starved to death.
Food prices will rise even more this year as crop yields fall with extreme climate change, and as more land is cultivated with crops we cannot eat. The food we do harvest is at the mercy of a corrupt system. How will the hungry access it?
It takes three kg of cereal to grow one kg of meat. Thirty percent of the planet’s arable land cultivates feed for its livestock. This means nearly half the cereal we grow is eaten by animals we will presently eat. These animals need to graze, so forests are cut down for pasturage.
Add to this the undeniable reality of several recent pandemics, having emerged solely as a result of unhealthy farming practices-BSE, SARS, avian flu and now swine flu-and the argument seems watertight. Turn vegetarian, and save the planet.
That looks neat on paper. The global bodies sourced for the statistics quoted above are well-informed and well-intentioned. But when I look around me, I see how much they are disconnected from reality. My reality, that is.
My reality is a Mumbai city where rice sells at a minimum of Rs 20 per kg, sugar at Rs 26, cooking oil at Rs 100 and milk at Rs 30 a litre. In this city, children starve to death every day. These aren’t freak deaths. They’re the end result of an infancy of want and a brief childhood of deprivation. Many of these children have never eaten a square meal. They have never tasted milk. Some, like their parents, have stuffed their mouths with weeds and dirt to quell the stomach’s cringing. Their deaths don’t make news. When an indignant journalist writes about them, there is swift official rebuttal. Not starvation, but ignorance is deemed the culprit, and ‘feeding programmes’ are set up to teach mothers how to feed their children.
Amicably, in areas of want, the state offers rice at Rs 2 per kilo, as happened in Orissa recently. How many of the hungry possessed even that buying power? This is the story of the consumer.
What of the farmer? His story is over. He has hanged himself in despair over his debts. The Maharashtra chief minister has gone on record saying suicide is a punishable offence.
Not very far away from the dead children, the hanged farmer, the woman who has neither rice nor the fuel to cook it, not very far away from them, are thousands of tons of rice and wheat rotting in rat-infested granaries. Something has got in the way of distributing them to the hungry. A certain something — the thin edge of the wedge — which produces a famine. Meanwhile, the country plans to import grain...
No doubt, these realities will be explained away by our economists, our financiers, our planners, our rulers, and a large part of the nation will understand those explanations. All excepting the dead child, the hanged farmer, the hungry woman who cannot cook a meal for her family.They will not understand. And neither do I.
It may be argued that the world is a larger issue. But it isn’t. Many of us will live and die on the street where we were born. That’s our planet as we perceive it. We’re eminently qualified to answer the question: How did it get so bad? One answer is: It’s always been this bad.
It was the answer I got four years ago when I asked this question about disease: ‘Why did Bombay have so many epidemics?’ ‘It’s always been so bad’ seemed the right answer at first.
At what cost?
History was far more dismal than the present. Wave after wave of disease lashed Bombay from the mid-19th century to the 1920s. Epidemics alternated with famines. Of course, the city was filthy and overcrowded then as it is now — but did that explain everything? After all, Bombay had been different before. In the 16th century, the Portuguese considered it a health resort. What went wrong?
As I searched long and hard, a pattern began to emerge. Every time Bombay had changed its looks, it was hit by a killer disease. And every time before people got sick, they got hungry.
Bombay is changing again, and faster than it ever has before. That makes me twitchy. It spells famine, and killer diseases are not far away. I’m not alone in my fears. Here are the figures. World food prices are likely to go up by 30 percent.The first to suffer will be those below five years of age — childhood mortality will rise by 25 percent.
Every day 230,000 new people are added to the planet. What will they eat? Should we grow more food? Where? And at what cost?
Every Indian is vegetarian. Even if some of us eat meat and fish, we never eat anything close to the global average of 37.5 kg of meat per year per person to qualify as carnivores. What fraction of India do you imagine comes anywhere close to getting 10 gms of protein/kg/day? In India, the question isn’t what you eat, but whether you eat at all.
More than 20,000 km of arable land is lost every year to degradation. The more land we clear for crops the more forest is lost, and hotter grows the planet. Glaciers melt, rivers flood, crops fail, and we end up paying Rs 60 for a kilo of dal.
‘Vegetarian’ is a circus word that keeps us from noticing the lack of bread. It has cachet. Look at how it’s used on signboards — ‘Pure vegetarian’. Bad grammar, certainly, but it’s much more than that. The more correct ‘Purely vegetarian’ will convey neither the sneer nor the snark of moral superiority that ‘Pure vegetarian’ does.
The phrase comes with a terrible baggage of virtue. We’re vegetarian, a race apart from the rest of flesh-eating blood-spilling humanity. We’re kind. We’re humane.
Oh really?
India has an unmatched record of cruelty towards its own. We slaughter our babies, we murder our daughters, we burn our brides and kill our widows. You just have to look around any metropolis with a large NRI population to find out what happens to our old. Our cities are full of hungry children. Our villagers starve to death. We don’t feel the need to even share a meal with a hungry neighbour, except as ritual or penance. We no longer introspect. Surprisingly, as hardcore vegetarians, we no longer ruminate.
If this is the Indian brand of ahimsa, I want none of it. Some say we are what we eat.
The most horrific genocide in recent times occurred in a ‘pure vegetarian’ state. All pity chok’d with custom of fell deed just about describes the morality of our vegetarian nation.
No, vegetarianism won’t save the planet. But you and I can, by returning the planet to a semblance of what it was meant to be — with hills and rivers and unpolluted seas. The gutter on your street opens into the river that flows into the sea.
Else that hungry stranger we ignore will, very soon, be you or me.
(Kalpish Ratna is the pseudonym of Mumbai surgeons and authors Ishrat Syed and Kalpana Swaminathan.)
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