4 minutes reading time
I don't even know why I'm vegetarian.
It isn't out of ethics or some grand bullshit anymore. When I was a child, after I saw the butchering of a goat, I stopped eating meat. But I don't feel that anymore. I am no longer 7 years old. Why am I still not eating non-veg? It's not religion either. The truth is much simpler and uglier: non-veg is just fucking expensive.
And because I haven't eaten meat in so long, whenever I see people around me dig into chicken or tear apart flesh, I get this immediate wave of aversion. A deep, physical revulsion. So I have a strong preference for vegetarian food now, even if my body is begging for cheap protein.
I keep reading everywhere that animal protein is superior. You need protein for your brain, for your muscles, so you don't end up looking like a starved ghost by thirty. I look at myself in the mirror and I see a scrawny, underfed tier-3 engineering dropout who subsists on ration rice and five-rupee Aavin buttermilk when cash runs dry. Remember that day at Dairy Circle? Scraping the bottom of my pockets just to buy a plastic sachet of cold salted water while refrigerated milk trucks rolled past. That's the baseline.
So yeah, animal protein sounds great in theory. But meat costs actual money.
When people here say "non-veg," they almost always mean chicken. Broiler chicken, pumped full of antibiotics and cheap grain. Mutton (goat or lamb) is completely out of the question. A kilo of mutton costs more than my weekly food allowance. It's rich people food. When I lived in Kochi for a bit, I saw beef shops everywhere, big red chunks hanging from hooks on the roadside with flies buzzing around them. I never ate it. I don't even know why. Just never crossed that line.
Which got me wondering while sitting in this stuffy PG room today: why don't we eat a wider variety of cheap meat?
Why isn't rabbit or pork common in South India? Rabbit seems like a no-brainer. Rabbits reproduce like insane biological machines, they grow ridiculously fast, and they feed on basic greens. They have a far better feed-conversion ratio than cattle or pigs. Yet you can't buy a rabbit in a Coimbatore market unless you know some underground breeder or catch one in a field.
Then my brain drifted into weird territory. Cold-blooded animals. Ectotherms.
Basic physics: endotherms like chickens and cows waste a massive percentage of their food energy just keeping their internal body temperature at 37 degrees Celsius. Cold-blooded creatures don't waste calories on heat. Almost every gram of grain or insect they consume gets converted directly into body mass. So in pure thermodynamic terms, reptiles or amphibians should produce the cheapest animal protein on earth.
...and then I actually pictured chewing on a salted lizard or python steak, and a cold shiver ran right down my spine. Fuck no.
Fish and shrimp make sense because they're ectotherms too, but good fresh fish in an inland city costs as much as chicken anyway. Some PGs in town serve chicken once a week on Sundays. The PG I'm stuck in right now doesn't even do that. The food here is just watery sambar, cabbage poriyal that tastes like wet cardboard, and rice that feels like rubber bullets.
The joke is, I don't even like the taste of meat.
I've tried a bite of chicken once or twice when a friend pushed it on me. I hated the texture. It felt stringy, like chewing on greasy wet string. I can't touch boiled eggs either; the smell of sulfur when you peel a hard-boiled egg makes me want to gag. The only egg I ever enjoyed was the scrambled egg my grandmother used to make back home, chopped tiny, burnt around the edges, loaded with an absurd amount of small red shallots fried in coconut oil. That was good.
I don't know. I'm just rambling here into my notebook because I'm hungry and my pocket is empty again. We sit around analyzing animal thermodynamic conversion efficiency when the real problem is just having twenty rupees in your pocket to buy a decent meal.
Image Credit: The Butcher's Shop by Annibale Carracci via Wikimedia Commons