The Pink Revolution, or How Asia Is Getting Hooked on Meat, Fast
As steak houses go, The Only Place is rather unassuming. The atmosphere is relaxed, the decor quite simple: square tables covered in red-and-white-checkered linen, alpine-style wooden chairs. Rows of Christmas lights blink lazily under the ceiling. The mustachioed waiters appear slightly bored in their crisp white shirts. In fact, little would be notable about The Only Place if not for its location. The steak house is hidden on one of the backstreets of downtown Bengaluru, India—the country where cows are so worshipped that killing one can get you in prison. In fact, their urine is considered sacred and is used to bathe sick kids. And yet the menu at The Only Place features Philly cheese steak, chateaubriand supreme, and double filet mignon. Beef, beef, and more beef.
My steak arrives on a simple white plate, in a cloud of succulent aromas. Although I take only a few bites (my husband polishes off the rest), it’s enough to tell the meat is delicious. Sacred or not, Indian beef tastes good.
Whenever I tell this story, people (Westerners) usually react with shock: You had beef in India? Is it even legal? The answers are “yes” and “yes.” The Only Place was a pioneer when it swung its doors open in 1970, but nowadays steak houses are all the rage in wealthy, metropolitan India. What’s more, India has recently taken over Australia as the world’s second-largest exporter of beef—after Brazil. That’s right: the India of holy cows exports more dead bovines than almost any other nation on the planet.
Granted, India still has a very low meat intake—just 7 pounds per person per year to the US’s astounding 275 pounds—but it’s growing shockingly fast. By 2030, for example, poultry consumption in India’s sprawling cities is projected to shoot up from 2000 levels by 1,277 percent. And the same thing is happening all across Asia. By 2030, Malaysia’s beef consumption will likely be up 159 percent, Cambodia’s 146 percent, and the urban dwellers in Laos will go through 1,049 percent more poultry. Meanwhile, China will gobble 22,050,000 tons more pork—that’s about as much in weight as a hundred thousand fully loaded Boeing 787-8 Dreamliners. With 2.5 billion people in India and China alone, Asia’s growing appetite for meat spells trouble not only for the animals that will be killed and eaten but also for the health of Asians—and of our planet.
What is happening in the nations of Asia and in developing countries on other continents, too, even if on a smaller scale, is what scientists refer to as the nutrition transition. There are five recognized patterns or stages of nutrition transition. First, a society goes from stage 1, collection of food (hunting and gathering), to stage 2, famine (which starts with agriculture). Then comes stage 3, receding famine, during which agriculture improves and severe hunger becomes a thing of the past but foods remain unprocessed and simple. Later, as time passes, societies go through an industrial revolution and enter stage 4, degenerative disease. That’s where the West is now: eating poor diets loaded with cholesterol, sugar, and fat. But that’s not the end of the path. Nutritionists predict that there is one more step to take: stage 5, behavioral change. Behavioral change means, in a way, moving back to eating foods similar to those consumed by stage 1 societies: much less meat, more fruits, veggies, and whole grains.
For now, what’s going on in Asia is a transition from stage 3 (receding famine) to stage 4 (degenerative disease). The more money people in developing countries have to spend on food, the more meat they buy. One study showed that each increase in yearly income of US $1,000 boosts per capita meat consumption in Asian countries by 2.6 pounds, in Africa by 3.6 pounds, and in the Middle East by 8.8 pounds. Members of developing nations, which formerly comprised the world’s least meathooked populations, have revealed that they’re willing to spend their hard-earned wages on meat, which they may have no tradition of eating, and damage their health in the process. We’re left with one question: Why?
The first East Asian country to develop an appetite for meat, and one that can offer a glimpse into the process of going from almost vegetarian to meat loving in a relatively short period of time, is Japan. As late as 1939 a typical Japanese ate just 0.1 ounce of meat per day. That’s a yearly average, of course. Today, the daily meat portion of a typical Yamada Tarō (the Japanese equivalent of John Smith) is 4.7 ounces, and his favorite animal protein is pork, not tuna in a sushi roll. One reason behind this astounding change was the rise of Western influence.
Medieval Japan was practically vegetarian. The national religions, Buddhism and Shintoism, both promoted plant-based eating, but what was likely more key to keeping the Japanese off meat was the shortage of arable land on the islands. Growing livestock takes land away from more efficient plant agriculture, and already in medieval Japan, too many forests had been cleared for fields and too many draft animals were being killed for their flesh—which prompted Japan’s rulers to issue meat-eating bans. The first such ban was announced in 675 CE and meant no beef, monkey, chicken, or dog in Japanese pots from late spring until early autumn. Later, more bans followed. For some time, the Japanese could still satisfy their meat cravings with wild game, but as the population increased and forests gave way to cropland, deer and boars disappeared and so did meat from the plates of the Yamada Tarōs.
The winds of change started blowing, at first mildly, in the eighteenth century. It was the Dutch who sowed in Japanese minds the idea that eating meat is good for health. The Japanese came to see the meat-loaded diets of the tall Europeans as a symbol of progress, of breaking with feudal, hierarchical society. In 1872, Japanese diets took a fast swerve toward meat. That year, on January 24, a feminine-looking, poetry-writing emperor Meiji publicly ate meat for the first time, giving the nation permission to follow his example. Over just five years, beef consumption in Tokyo shot up more than thirteen times (what made it possible were imports from Korea). Meiji and his government saw meat not only as a way to modernize Japan and boost the health of the average citizen but also as a way to bolster the strength of the Japanese army. Back then, typical conscripts were small and thin—over 16 percent of candidates failed to meet the minimum height of four feet eleven inches.
The American occupation after the Second World War gave another powerful boost to the Japanese hunger for meat. The Japanese observed the war victors stuffing themselves with hamburgers, steaks, and bacon. The words of Den Fujita, the chief of McDonald’s Japanese operations, sum up the prevailing sentiment pretty well: “If we eat hamburgers for a thousand years, we will become blond. And when we become blond we can conquer the world.”
The story of India’s newfound taste for animal protein is in many ways similar to what had happened in Japan. It’s a story of longing to become modern and powerful, a member of the “we’ve made it” club. And Bengaluru, this dusty tangle of humans and buildings and cars, this cacophony of a city, where the twenty-first century mixes with the distant past on every corner, is a perfect place to study India’s ambivalent relationship with animal flesh.
Bengaluru used to be called the “garden city.” But in recent years the trees and lawns have given way to offices and apartment buildings, to an outbreak of stores and potholed streets. Now Bengaluru is a city known for its pollution and congestion—but also for being the capital of the nation’s IT industry, the silicon valley of India. It’s loud. It’s overwhelming. Expensive limousines maneuver between dirty, overcrowded buses and rusty auto rickshaws.
Renovated fancy boutiques at street level are housed in buildings that are otherwise crumbling. Loose wires hang over outdoor café tables, where middle-class patrons sip lattes. The air smells of perfumed women, of sweat, of gasoline and dust, the same dust that keeps pushing its way into my mouth and eyes.
The Only Place is much more peaceful. Behind its doors it is quiet enough so that I don’t have to struggle to hear the story that Ajath Anjanappa tells me over a beefsteak—the story of how so many young, middle-class Indians go about giving up vegetarianism.
Anjanappa is, in many ways, a typical successful Bengalurean. A thirty-something engineer with an MBA degree earned in the US, he now runs his own company, which provides energy-efficient lighting to local industries. He is easygoing and good-looking. And like many of his generation, he loves meat. These days, as Anjanappa explains, to eat steaks and burgers in India is to be modern and worldly. It is a sign that you belong to the group of people who jet around the planet and work for multinational corporations. “It can help you in your career,” he tells me.
Anjanappa’s affair with meat began the way it usually does for wealthy Indians: you grow up either in a family that is pure veg (Indian for “vegetarian”) or one that consumes very little meat. You go to college, you make new friends. You start eating out in the many international restaurants that have sprouted all over Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi. “All my non-veg friends were pushing me, saying I was missing out. If you are a vegetarian you don’t belong to the same social circle. By the time we graduated, all my friends were meat eaters,” Anjanappa says. Then you go to work for a Western corporation. “A lot of companies like Google or Apple have their own cafeterias where there is a lot of meat served, for free. So why not eat it?” Anjanappa tells me. As years pass, you travel for work outside India where there is often no decent vegetarian food to be had. You either eat meat, or you go hungry. So you eat it, and you start to like it. Those young Indians who work for multinational companies often make good money, and they spend it trying new things, including new cuisines. What makes pressure to eat meat harder to resist in India is the communal way in which meals are enjoyed there. As in many Asian countries, and not in the individualistic West, dishes in India are shared. There is a huge pressure to eat what others are having. To refuse food is to be antisocial.
Yet even in up-and-coming Bengaluru, steak houses are not a common sight. And many locals, when I ask them about their country’s beef industry, are surprised to learn that India is the second-largest exporter of meat in the world. Unbeknownst to many, in 2013 and 2014, beef shipments from the subcontinent rose a staggering 31 percent. A big chunk of that meat goes first to Vietnam and later on to China. A lot ends up in the Gulf states and in North Africa. For the US and UK, there is only a trickle left, so the chances you are grilling Indian bovines on your barbecue are slim. But many Western producers are nevertheless worried about the competition. Indian beef is cheap and lean, and it’s flooding the markets.
But at least officially, India is not killing off its holy cows. The beef it exports actually comes from water buffaloes, a species of bovine closely related to cows but not quite the same thing. Water buffaloes are not sacred. They do not spend their old age in senior houses or get buried in cemeteries—the way cows do in India. Instead, water buffaloes are overloaded on trucks, transported without food and water, and slaughtered in miserable conditions similar to the American meat industrial complex.
Officially, cow meat is not exported from India, but in reality, there exists an underground cow slaughter industry that labels the meat “buffalo” while it is still in India and relabels it “cow” once it crosses the border. According to a local chapter of the nonprofit organization PETA, there are about thirty thousand illegal slaughterhouses in India, many of them turning holy cows into steaks. As Anjanappa tells me: “As long as the money is coming in, they don’t mind what they are killing.”
For Western ethical vegetarians, who gave up meat for the sake of animals, such duality is often hard to comprehend. How is it possible that killing a holy cow is a horrible sin and often a crime, while butchering their close cousins, the buffaloes, is perfectly fine? How can young, wealthy Indians chuck their vegetarianism so fast—and seemingly with little regret? And yet, it does make sense. After all, in India, vegetarianism means a very different thing than it does in the West.
First and foremost, vegetarianism and the sacredness of cows don’t necessarily go hand in hand. Millions of Indians who never touch beef have no problem at all eating chicken or pork. Meanwhile, even though cows have been considered holy in India for centuries, before 1000 CE the sacred animals were still slaughtered and eaten. The ban on eating holy cows crept into the culture slowly, over time. Today, devout Hindus believe that the body of every cow is inhabited by 330 million gods, and to become a cow, a soul has to transmigrate eighty-six times (that’s a lot of lives to go through). Until recently, killing a cow carried the death penalty in the state of Kashmir. The fact that the ancestors of Indians ate the sacred animals is something that many in India are trying to forget: in 2006, mentions of ancient Hindus consuming beef were deleted from school textbooks.
Vegetarianism in India didn’t arise from the veneration of cows. It developed independently, from a concept called ahimsa, or nonviolence. Basically, ahimsa means that all life is sacred and should not be destroyed. Nonviolence is a common thread linking the three Indian religions: Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. But ahimsa doesn’t necessarily imply that you cannot eat meat—not according to everyone’s interpretation. Ahimsa is not about animals. It’s about people. Just like Pythagoras in ancient Greece, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism concentrate on what violence does to human souls and how it can degrade them. So if you didn’t kill the animal yourself and didn’t ask anyone to do it, there is no violence to stain your spirit, and you are OK. Buddha ate meat, and even the founder of Jainism, Mahavira, once ate a few pigeons that were killed by a cat.
For many in India ahimsa still means that meat should never be eaten because it comes from soul-polluting violence. Yet this form of vegetarianism is still all about humans and not about animals, which makes it easier for adherents to start eating meat once they cease being religious. There is very little discussion about the suffering of meat animals in Indian media, barely any at all. For most, vegetarianism is a way of life, a tradition taken as is. Those who consciously decide not to eat animals either for health or for ethical reasons stand out—so much so that they are called “out-of-choice vegetarians.”
If vegetarianism in India is not a choice for most and often seen as conservative and even backward, meat eating stands for modernization and progress. Just like the Japanese poet-emperor Meiji, Mahatma Gandhi also, at some point in his life, believed that a meat-based diet could push India forward and upward. Yes, that Gandhi. Violence-abhorring, meat-abstaining Gandhi. But he wasn’t always a vegetarian. Although he was born into a typical Indian religious pure-veg family, he soon came to regard meat eating as something that could help modernize the subcontinent. It was a common belief back in the late nineteenth century that to eat meat was a patriotic duty, a way for Indians to become as strong and powerful as the English so that they could drive the colonialists out. One comic poem became particularly popular: “Behold the mighty Englishman / He rules the Indian small, / Because being a meat-eater He is five cubits tall.” And so, one day, Gandhi decided to start eating meat. He and his friend, already a meat eater, packed freshly baked bread and some cooked goat and hiked to a lonely spot by the river so that no one would see them. Once there, Gandhi took a bite of the meat and started to chew. He didn’t like it, not at all. The meat was tough as leather. He just couldn’t finish it. Later, at night, he was tormented by nightmares and felt as if “a live goat were bleating” inside him. But he kept reminding himself that eating meat was a duty, that he simply had to do it.
Soon after, when he moved to London, Gandhi began to eat meat in fancy restaurants and learned to enjoy the taste. He admitted in his autobiography that for a while he wished that “every Indian should be a meat-eater.” But in time, Gandhi went back to vegetarianism. He became, as he said, a “vegetarian by choice.” After reading many books on nutrition and ethics, he was convinced not only that vegetarianism was better from a moral perspective but also that a plant-based diet was advantageous for health. He started to see that meat eating wouldn’t turn India into a powerful nation—and maybe just the opposite.
Today, you won’t hear many Indians say that meat eating is a national duty and that it will help India rule the world, but the belief that animal protein makes individual people strong is still alive and well. In India, the media are rather quiet about all the studies that connect a meat-eating diet with cancer, diabetes, and heart disease; yet there are many articles that glorify meat eating as a key to good nutrition. The protein myth is particularly potent. The Times of India, a leading newspaper, writes: “Keep in mind that vegetarianism comes with its share of problems because plant foods tend to lack protein.” On television, celebrity chefs whip up meat-based dishes, and male actors go non-veg to gain muscles for their roles. Salman Khan, the highest-paid Bollywood star, famed and beloved not only for his stage talents but also for his muscular body, is a proud meat eater, preaching the gospel of non-veg to the masses. And so it’s hard to blame Anjanappa for believing that as a regular gym-goer he needs to eat meat—even though science clearly shows that that is not true. In fact, the traditional veg Indian fare is far from deficient in proteins. Just think about it: they have over fifty varieties of lentils, peas, and beans, all loaded with protein, and if paired with rice, the combination makes a complete protein. Vegetarianism could have taken root in India much easier than in Europe or North America precisely because of the culinary diversity and protein load that local plants could offer. A prominent Indian food historian, K. T. Achaya, went so far as to declare: “Perhaps nowhere else in the world except in India would it have been possible 3000 years ago to be a strict vegetarian.”
Just as in Gandhi’s times, though, consuming meat in India is still often a political act. Several beef-eating festivals organized at India’s universities ended in violent clashes with more conservative groups. “Beef is a symbol of anti-Brahmanism,” stated one student organization. And scientists agree: eating beef in India stands for modernization. It opposes the caste system, which is topped by beef-avoiding Brahmins, and thereby undermines authority. During the campaign for parliament in 2014, the conservative BJP party tried to win votes for its leader using a slogan: “Vote for Modi, give life to the cow.” Narendra Modi, a stout man with white hair that connects via sideburns with his trim beard and perfectly circles his round face, coined the term pink revolution to describe India’s growing hunger for meat—and for money made from exporting beef. Before the elections, Modi spoke of the meat industry’s crimes against “mother cow” and suggested the beef trade should be banned. Yet months after he won and became prime minister, the pink revolution was still rolling. It seems that meat exports are just too good of a cash cow for India to shut down.
Beef may be the most politically sensitive of India’s meats, but it’s chicken that is the most often eaten. Girinagar, an upscale neighborhood of Kerala’s twin city Ernakulam-Kochi, is leafy and green, with traffic subdued, almost calm. The air here is thick with foul vapors that rise from the area’s many canals, green streams of trash and vegetation that crisscross this part of urban Kerala, but most houses are neat, oversized, and obviously pricey. In the maze of unnamed, narrow streets, a small store is hidden. A store that embraces India’s growing hunger for meat and what’s behind it: hunger for modernity, for riches. The store belongs to a chain called Suguna Daily Fressh and offers hygienically packed, easy-to-prepare chicken. It may look like nothing special to a Westerner, but in India, a country where until recently to cook a chicken entailed buying it at an overcrowded market, plucking it, and cleaning its guts, the store is very different. Stores like Suguna Daily Fressh, with their conveniently packaged and expensive products, are for the upper classes, who are driving India’s desire for meat. After all, people crave meat precisely because it is expensive. Who doesn’t want to be like the beautiful, light-skinned, and obviously successful people who gorge themselves on animal protein in the advertisements for KFC, McDonald’s, and the Meat Products of India? India wants to go up, and to go up means to eat meat.
Similar things are happening in China. In a country where the average person ate less than seven pounds of meat per year (in the early twentieth century), China is fast becoming a nation where many plates are overflowing with pork, chicken, and, to a lesser extent, beef. Since the 1980s, meat consumption in the People’s Republic has quadrupled. China is already ingesting over half of Earth’s pork, 20 percent of its chicken, and 10 percent of its beef. Soon, these numbers will be much higher. If China, with its population of 1.3 billion, ate as much animal flesh as Americans do today, they would be hogging (no pun intended) over 70 percent of the meat produced on the planet.
The themes behind China’s growing appetite for meat are similar to those in India and Japan. The Chinese are eating more and more meat because they are finally starting to be able to afford it and because the many years in which there was not enough animal flesh to go around resulted in it symbolizing luxury and wealth, modernity, the West, and power. And as in India, to eat meat in China often means to reject old social hierarchies. This is one of the reasons why fast-food joints such as McDonald’s and KFC thrive in the People’s Republic. As anthropologist Yunxiang Yan once wrote: “Many people patronize McDonald’s to experience a moment of equality.” In Western fast-food chains, all customers are treated with similar respect, no matter their age, social status, or wealth. That’s very different from traditional Chinese eateries, where—as Yan described—there is an ongoing competition among customers as to who will order the most expensive, luxurious meal. Say the guy sitting at the table next to you orders a chicken. Now, if you don’t want to lose face, you can’t just have veggies. To prove your social standing, you have to order meat, too, and preferably a more expensive dish. You are just about to ask the waiter for pork, when the guy at another table, to your left, beats you to it and places an order for pork dumplings. After mentally calculating how many yuans are left in your wallet, you order, with a slightly shaky voice, the most expensive pork on the menu. Face saved, money lost. At McDonald’s or KFC, with their short, simple menus of similarly priced and standardized dishes, such dilemmas don’t exist. What’s more, in these restaurants, people are consuming not just food but also Western culture, so often associated with individualism and democracy. And, of course, McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King, and the like are all about eating meat, so if you go there to experience the spirit of Western equality, as a side order you may get hooked on burgers and chicken.
Even though there may be many parallels between India’s and China’s growing desire for meat, there are quite a few important differences, too—differences that are the reason why China is already gorging on much more animal protein. Although the traditional Chinese diet is mostly plant based, vegetarianism never took root in China as deeply as it has in India. The Chinese ate so little meat in the past largely because they simply didn’t have enough good land to grow feed for livestock. Famines were common, very common, so the people here learned to eat anything that was available (hence the donkey penises, grilled scorpions, and other unusual-for-Westerners foods on Chinese menus). In China, the seeds for its future love affair with meat were already present, buried deep in the culture, waiting for a good time to sprout.
For many centuries, most followers of Buddhism in China were not vegetarian. By the sixth century, though, meat eating evolved to become a no-no for devout Chinese Buddhists. Consuming meat, the holy scriptures said, inhibits the ability to feel compassion. It causes nightmares. And yet Buddhist vegetarianism in China never became as widely practiced as Hindu vegetarianism did in India. It was mainly the domain of monks, while the elites kept wolfing down meat—so much of it that they were dubbed “the meat eaters.” The rich of China were at least as extravagant in their meat tastes as were their European counterparts and ate things like yak tails, bear paws, and leopard fetuses. And just like the medieval European peasants, who hungered for all the animal flesh heaped on the plates of the aristocracy, the Chinese masses dreamed of eating just like their nobles and equated wealth with meat. (By contrast, Indian nobility meant vegetarianism, and so that’s what people aspired to.) What also played a role in keeping China carnivorous, despite the arrival of Buddhism, was its bureaucracy. To rise through the ranks of the imperial government, a civil servant basically had to eat meat. Vegetarianism was considered inappropriate for high officials because public occasions required sharing meat to ensure social harmony. Meat avoiders were looked upon with suspicion and sometimes even forced to eat pork to make certain they didn’t belong to some radical vegetarian sect (heretics in Europe come to mind). And if that wasn’t enough to ensure China didn’t go completely veg, the beliefs of traditional Chinese medicine discouraged plant-based diets, too. Vegetables are generally “cold,” according to traditional Chinese dietary therapy. That’s fine if you are suffering from a fever, but if you have chills or fatigue, you need to nourish yourself with “hot” foods—such as meat. In traditional Chinese food therapy, meat is often necessary to balance your energy. If you don’t eat it, you may end up in trouble.
And then there is the Mandarin language. Take the words chicken and fish, for example. These words, when spoken in Mandarin, have the same sound as the words for “prosperous” and “abundance.” For this reason, people in China eat chicken and fish on Lunar New Year’s Eve to ensure good luck. Home is another word that may help reinforce meat-based diets in China. To make the character for “home” you basically take the character for a pig and put the character for a roof over it: pig plus roof equals home.
I remember staring at the thicket of Chinese characters covering the menu in one of Beijing’s sprawling restaurants. The room was bright and open and dotted with round tables. Everything seemed loud in there: the people, the smells of frying and roasting, the colors—a jumble of white, red, and gold. The plastic menu, sticky from too many hands touching it before me, was in Chinese only, and the pictures were quite blurred. When a waiter walked past me, I caught his attention. “What is that?” I asked, in my stiff, phrase-book Chinese. “Meat,” I heard in reply. “What meat?” I pressed. “Meat,” the waiter shrugged. I pointed to another dish, then another, and kept asking. But my understanding of the food on offer got only slightly better. It appeared that although some dishes were “chicken” or “fish” or even “donkey” (there was a donkey penis soup listed), lots of others were just “meat,” period.
In time I came to learn that if something in China is described simply as “meat,” it means pork. The Chinese love pork. Every other pig that is alive on this planet is being raised in China—and it will be slaughtered and cooked there. In the famine-ridden past, pigs were economic security. They were cheap to raise, feeding on household leftovers and even human excrement, and could be exchanged for political favors, given as wedding presents, and—of course—eaten. Today, China’s swine are still seen as a measure of food security, even on a national scale. The Communist government makes sure people keep buying pig meat by handing out grants and subsidies to hog producers, waiving their taxes, and offering them insurance. For China’s leaders, providing citizens with enough pork to fill their plates means progress and modernity. It means they’ve succeeded.
But there are problems. Asia’s nutrition transition means the health of people there is going downhill. It’s not all on account of meat, of course. The sodas, the sweets, the fries—all this has a role too, an ugly one. Still, there are plenty of studies that connect high intakes of meat with higher odds of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. And that’s what Asia is getting right now. There are already over sixty-one million people with type 2 diabetes in India, and by 2030 that number will likely double. In the twin city Ernakulam-Kochi, where hygienically wrapped Suguna Daily Fressh chicken is sold, almost one in five inhabitants is diabetic. The waists of Asia are expanding, too. Over 30 percent of Chinese adults are overweight. One hundred million are obese.
The poor nutrition and resulting poor health are only part of Asia’s meat-related problems. In March 2013, the pale bodies of over sixteen thousand dead pigs floated down Huangpu River near Shanghai. The carcasses were swollen and rotting, the stench nauseating. The animals, which may have died either of a virus or of extreme cold, had been dumped into the water from industrial farms upstream. The “hogwash incident,” as it was called in the media, is just one of many scandals that have plagued India’s and China’s booming meat business. There was the “instant chicken” scandal (China), when poultry were supposedly given eighteen different antibiotics to grow ultrafast. There was “Avatar meat” (China), when pork was said to be contaminated by phosphorescent bacteria and glowed blue in the dark. There has been one avian flu outbreak after another. It’s the sheer scale of the industry’s growth that causes these problems. When it comes to animal products, China in many respects has more stringent safety regulations than the US does. Take ractopamine, a drug that mimics stress hormones, which is given to as many as 80 percent of American pigs. But when the Chinese found out it was administered to their hogs, a scandal erupted (ractopamine is illegal as a feed additive in China).
Asia’s burgeoning appetite for meat is not just its problem—it’s our problem, too. The meat industry is international, and what happens in one part of the world often affects the others. The major challenge for the industry in China is land—as in, there’s not enough of it. China has a mere 0.08 hectare of arable land per person—6.5 times less than the US, over 16 times less than Canada. The Chinese simply can’t grow feed for all the animals they want to eat. India is also struggling with a land shortage and with a severe water shortage to boot. If China and India want to have a meat industry, which is enormously water intensive, on an American scale, they will be in trouble.
What do countries do that want meat but can’t produce enough of it? They could issue meat-eating bans the way medieval Japan did, but that’s highly unlikely these days, of course. Instead, they outsource. They import. And where are all these chops and burgers going to come from? The US, for one. In the last decade, the flow of pork from the States to China rose almost ten times. And that was before the biggest meat processor, Shuanghui International, purchased the American giant Smithfield Foods, to become the world’s largest pork producer. Yes, the money is pouring into US coffers, but there is a dark side to the deal. While the Chinese are consuming the meat, we are consuming the pollution: the lagoons of manure, the dirty air, the antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
The Chinese also import vast quantities of feed for their domestic livestock—and again, export the pollution. Chinese meat producers are on the constant lookout for land to grow soy and corn to fill the stomachs of their livestock. A lot of it comes from the US, some comes from Africa, and some from Eastern Europe, but the majority comes from Latin America. Already over 80 percent of Brazil’s soy exports are going to China, and the growth curve is nearly vertical. A slice of Brazil the size of Colorado is currently covered in soy crops destined for China; a similar thing is happening in Argentina. That’s not exactly good news. Ninety-nine percent of the soybeans grown in Brazil are genetically modified, and they are intensely sprayed with herbicides and fungicides. In Argentina’s soy-growing districts, such use of chemicals has already caused epidemic levels of cancers and birth defects.
It’s easy to criticize Asia’s meat hunger and point fingers at the trouble it’s causing, but these nations are basically following the path Europe and North America took some time ago. They are getting hooked on meat for many of the same reasons we did: because of meat’s taste, because of the meat industry’s lobbying and marketing, and because of meat’s symbolism. They want meat because they want to be modern, industrial, and rich. Often, they want to get rid of social hierarchies—and the West with its meat-laden cuisines stands for equality. The power of meat’s symbolism is particularly clear in India: when the Brahmin elites sat on top of the Indian world, the masses aspired to be vegetarian. Now, there is the West to look up to as the ultimate “we’ve made it” people. And these “we’ve made it” people eat plenty of meat. The young upper classes, the IT workers, and those with MBAs from US schools don’t want to be like the traditional villagers with their stomachs filled with lentils. The media is selling the protein myth, and they buy it. Even when they were vegetarian, they didn’t care for animals much, and they didn’t choose their diets themselves anyway, which now can make going non-veg a bit easier.
The Chinese, meanwhile, have loved meat, and pork in particular, all along—they just didn’t have enough land and resources to grow it. Now they can virtually “import” land from Brazil or the US, and they do. The Communist Party is all for it. Meat means prosperity, and the party wants the Chinese people to feel prosperous. The government distrusts vegetarianism because it is tied with religious movements of the past—something the government has worked hard to suppress. Asia is starting to eat more meat often not in spite of its vegetarian religions but precisely because of them—as a way to reject them and consign them to the past.
Of course, not everyone in India is an Ajath Anjanappa. Not everyone has money to dine on steaks in Western-style restaurants. In India, almost 70 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day, while a Suguna chicken breast costs about $2.50 per pound. In China, millions can’t afford to dine on KFC chicken, either. But this destitute people look up to the rich and take note of their growing appetite for meat. They see the butcher shops opening, the steak houses luring; they see the non-veg Bollywood stars flexing their muscles on TV. And they want meat, too.
But our planet simply can’t afford Asia’s hunger for meat. It can’t afford the antibiotics loaded into livestock, the water that needs to be pumped into production. It can’t afford the global warming that it is causing. Likewise, it can’t afford the West’s meat addiction, either. It is time for nutrition transition, stage 5: behavioral change. But is it likely that we will markedly cut down our meat consumption in the near future? And how exactly can we change?