5 min readFeb 26, 2026 08:27 AM IST First published on: Feb 26, 2026 at 08:27 AM ISTSometime ago, I was talking to a young man — let’s call him Rakesh — from one of the villages in Gurugram that is now part of the district’s urban spread. Over the past two decades, his family — marginal farmers on poor-quality land — had sold a great deal of their ancestral holdings to global real-estate companies. This had provided for a large house, cars, nutritious food, and perhaps most importantly, educational opportunities for the children of the household. Access to modern education, largely denied to the community to which my interlocutor belongs, means that he was able to secure a job that allows global travel. An important part of our discussion concerned his shift from the vegetarian diet customary in his community to a non-vegetarian one he now clearly enjoyed. The road he had travelled from daal-sabzi to omelettes and fried fish was also a story of his transformation — as he saw it — to a cosmopolitan identity.There is a long history of the relationship between food and identity, such as caste and self-definition. The modern history of the relationship between food and identity is, however, rooted in two other contexts. The more recent of these is the history of aspirations that concerns Rakesh’s culinary adventures. A slightly older one has to do with the rise of a nationalist consciousness. Some of the most striking passages in the autobiography of nationalist Bipin Chandra Pal (1858-1932) concern his observations about food in Calcutta, the city he had come to for higher education. For Pal, the city’s food cultures defined urban life itself.AdvertisementIn both the above cases, food represents who we are: People make choices about food to represent themselves. The recent ban on the sale of meat near educational institutions and religious places (that is, temples) by the Bihar government upturns the relationship between humans and food. It is now the case that dead meat has the capacity to influence how the living react.Bihar’s Deputy Chief Minister Vijay Kumar Sinha has noted that selling meat near temples and educational institutions will lead to “social disharmony” and aggression among children, respectively. Did dead flesh ever have the capacity to influence social relations and emotions? And, are vegetarians inherently peaceful?Violent tendencies in children are the result of the social circumstances in which they might find themselves. Male children might be socialised to be aggressive to meet generally accepted norms of masculinity, or they might be reared in an environment where violence against a different religious community is promoted as a normal activity. Neither vegetables nor meat has any role in the making of the social life of humans. Only humans do. Buddhism is frequently represented as a religion of peace, but meat eating is common among Buddhists. And, even though it seems almost redundant to say this, Adolf Hitler greatly favoured vegetarianism.AdvertisementSinha also noted that the ban followed consultations with “intellectuals during public outreach programmes”. It is most likely that the intellectual now advising him about the ill effects of meat sales near temples and schools is unaware of the different ways in which food eating has been interpreted in recent history. Swami Vivekananda’s suggestion that humans choose to be vegetarian or meat-eating rather than vegetables and meat exercising influence upon humans is something that still holds true.you may likeHowever, and much more importantly, the new regulations regarding meat should be seen for what they are: Making the ghost of dead things rule over the activities of the living to excuse the lack of serious action that improves social and public welfare. What is required for social harmony and a decline in aggression among children (and adults) is a combination of public-oriented state action and a re-thinking of how we live our private lives. That is, social harmony is best promoted through better public welfare measures — a good educational system, measures to ensure gender equity, public parks, for example — rather than the fake politics of dead flesh. The invocation of the ghost of dead animals as significant players in the lives of humans is little more than a ruse to cover the failures of those whose task it is improve public welfare.Separated by decades and social background, both Rakesh and Bipin Chandra Pal describe the capacities of human beings to determine their futures through the choices they make. Both would be aghast at being told that lifeless objects — food items — choose them and make them what they are. But perhaps that is what this latest meat episode is about: The continuing effort to produce a lifeless public.The writer is distinguished research professor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London