
Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India by James Staples (published by University of Washington Press in 2020) is a detailed ethnographic account of the ambivalence resulting from the everyday negotiation of meat consumption in India, particularly in the context of rising cow protectionism and economic liberalization. The book is rich in empirical details from fieldwork carried out in a self-run leprosy colony in coastal Andhra Pradesh, and in Hyderabad, over almost two decades. The long engagement with the field allowed Staples to form a good rapport, giving him access to mundane everyday aspects of food practices beef shops that are otherwise hidden from public view, to witnessing cow slaughter before dawn, the location of which is circulated only through word of mouth. Also, Staples could notice how meat-eating practices, and discourses around them, transformed between his early fieldwork in 1999-2000, and later visits in 2016-17.
Staples emphasizes that in a time when cow vigilantism and communal tensions are on the rise, one shouldn’t make the mistake of reducing ordinary people’s narrative around beef consumption into simple binaries like “beef-devouring Dalits or Muslims” versus “Hindu-right cow protectors”. Instead, the focus needs to be on how Dalits, Muslims, Christians, and even upper-caste vegetarian Hindus adopt a complex, ambivalent position in their everyday negotiations with meat consumption.
The book critically engages with the myth propagated by cow-protection advocates that cows have always been sacred and venerated in ‘Indian tradition’, which empirical history proves incorrect. Thus, Staples argues that as dominant narratives are out of touch with lived realities, ordinary people’s position on beef consumption on the ground remains fluid and often contradictory – as there are people who eat beef yet consider cow-slaughter ban as necessary, there are beef sellers who don’t eat beef despite being Dalit, and there are upper-caste Hindus who are complicit in sustaining the domestic beef industry through “strategic ignorance”, and also those upper-caste Hindus who secretly enjoy eating beef. Through his attention to these contradictions, Staples reveals that food practices cannot be reduced to preference, nutrition, and rigid caste norms, as their meanings are constantly produced through ongoing interactions within changing power structures and everyday social relations.
Staples’ work provides a valuable critique of the discourses that examine beef consumption only through the macro lens of contemporary meat politics and the growing Hindu nationalism, by emphasizing the importance of looking at micro-level, everyday practices as well. Staples highlights how socio-economic changes like globalization, play a major role in changing meat-eating practices. The growing farm production of affordable broiler chicken and the popularity of cosmopolitan dishes like Chicken Manchurian among the youth are examples of how consumption patterns are reshaped. Staples further brings our attention to emerging health discourses around beef along with health practitioners’ advice that influence people’s choices and moral positions around beef. Through these interconnected themes, the book provides valuable insights into how the materiality of food acquires new symbolic meanings, as it interacts with multiple, often contradictory factors.
Staples also managed to capture how caste and class interact in shaping food practices and their meanings in contemporary India. With the growth of the aspirational middle class, consumption becomes a significant marker of status- though its meaning may vary in relation to caste. For some, eating beef may become a marker of prestige and a symbol of cosmopolitan, modern identity, especially among marginalized communities who have achieved upward economic mobility. For others with unstable economic conditions and disadvantaged social positions, however, beef consumption can become a liability, as it is perceived as a hindrance in their pursuit of upward mobility. Thus, Staples shows how food is not a passive reflection of rigid caste norms but something that gets redefined in response to changing social realities.
Throughout the book, Staples refers to Sidney Mintz, whose work demonstrated how the material and symbolic meanings of food are inseparable, and how they shift over time, further reshaping social relationships. This understanding of food provides a significant perspective while reading the book. While Staples moves beyond the simple binaries around beef consumption, at times, his emphasis on individual negotiations often risks neutralizing the larger structural and political forces at play. At a time when majoritarian violence and state complicity are central to the politics of beef, Staples failed to maintain a clear narrative, as his arguments shift between narrating the violence faced by beef traders and downplaying the influence of dominant narratives on so-called “personal choices”.
Even the shift from beef to chicken is attributed to chicken’s affordability and globalization. However, Staples seems to fail to address how the very category of ‘affordability’ is a complex construction. Historically, beef has been the meat of the poor- therefore, its rising price cannot be seen independently from growing cow vigilantism, especially as the traders themselves acknowledged adding extra charges due to the additional cost of risk management. Moreover, despite its cost, beef could have remained the preferred choice if it was a safer option like chicken. Staples’ observation that his respondents go to extreme lengths to get “foodstuff of superior taste” and accounts of broiler chicken being “grudgingly accepted rather than celebrated”, points to this complexity. As a result, while the book is rich in empirical details that bring out interesting nuances, the analysis often fails to capture their full potential, thus failing to show how the current political context reshapes the symbolic associations of beef in a way that almost looks neutral.
However, the critique is not meant to undermine the significance of the book in contributing to the sociology of food. The book highlights how despite modernity’s tendency to make us reduce social life to binaries, something as mundane as people’s food practices reveals the everyday complexities of negotiations and resistance. These acts may not overthrow the dominant structures, but they produce a state of ambivalence in the lived realities of social actors. In terms of the long-standing debates around structure and agency in the discipline of Sociology, Staples’ work is a significant contribution as it illustrates in detail how messily the two are entangled in everyday life.
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Bidisha Medhi is a PhD research scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati.