Are Most Indians Vegetarian?

What percentage of the Indian population is vegetarian? 60%? 40%?

Would it surprise you to know that the answer is almost certainly less than 30%? And one reason that that number even that high is because most of the population is in North India, where vegetarianism is at least somewhat common among the upper castes. In parts of South India vegetarianism is almost unheard of.

But that estimate is almost certainly incorrect. The traditional way to measure vegetarianism is through population based surveys and questionnaires. There are two problems with that way of measuring. The first is the question of which populations are likely to be surveyed. India is an incredibly diverse country with variations between class, caste, gender and linguistic identity. The result is that reliable data is notoriously hard to come by because entire categories of people - say Bengali speaking Dalits in Bombay, for example - are likely to be excluded from data collection. We know that data collection even in sectors where the government invests a lot of money is poor; how much poorer is it likely to be when it comes to food and nutrition given the underfunding of such research?

There’s another reason to be suspicious of the data. In today’s environment there is a cultural and social pressure to identify as vegetarian. It is not at all uncommon for someone to be “vegetarian” at home but to be found in the biryani line when they go out. Since surveys are often done at home, people are likely to respond one way when asked the question about their dietary preferences at home and quite another way if you were conducting the survey in a restaurant. Anecdotally we all know stories of people who won’t touch non-veg in one context, but will in another. Would a study using hair analysis to test what a person was actually eating as opposed to what they say they’re eating show that India has far less vegetarians than the surveys show?

That said, it is true that Indians consume less meat per capita than almost any other country in the world. Dr. Veena Shatrugna, who I recently interviewed on the podcast, makes a convincing case that this is less about dietary preference and more about economics and public policy. Most people can’t afford to eat meat every day; many people can barely afford vegetarian sources of protein. And instead of raising wages and living standards, governments have promoted a nutrition policy that claims that plant based proteins can be sufficient for poor people.

The results are horrifying. Some of the more frightening statistics that Dr. Veena covers include the following:

• Lower class women suffer from osteoporosis as many as 15 years earlier than women in Europe or higher class women.
• Many children are more likely to suffer from stunting than their mothers were, indicating that the quality of food has decreased when compared with that of previous decades.
• Some people who look skinny and would not qualify as obese in terms of BMI or any similar metric have almost no muscle at all. Their body composition scores indicate that, although they’re at risk of starvation, they are still 30% or more body fat. Doctors and nutritionists are at a loss for how to build muscle mass in such a population.

None of this should be taken to mean that it is not possible to be healthy on a vegetarian or even a vegan diet. Many people - myself included - have lived for decades on vegetarian and vegan diets and been quite healthy. But nearly all of us - like most of the vegetarian population in India - enjoyed some level of privilege which allowed us to experiment with foods that weren’t our traditional foods and sometimes to supplement with pills and powders we find at expensive health food stores. For those who can afford to eat such a diet and choose to do so, great. You have the right to eat as you wish; you don’t have the right to force your dietary preference onto others, including those who can’t afford the pills and powders.

Pushing a plant-only diet on a population either through demonising Muslim vendors (many of whom have been selling meat to Hindus for generations) or through advocating for specific food policies that aren’t based on evidence is clearly the wrong thing to do. Worse yet, by demonising the meat of an animal that is also revered for its milk, faeces and even its urine, the Indian government is creating conflict between farmers and cattle, resulting in ridiculous stories like this one of hundreds of cows being locked up in a school out of fear that they will continue to destroy valuable crops.

Ultimately nutrition policy should serve the goal of the health and welfare of the society. In the case of India, those policies have been a failure. The latest UNDP Human Development Index ranks India at number 131 out of 190 countries and while some indicators are trending upwards, the rate of improvement has reduced in recent years.

No one can say whether or not those figures would be better had India followed a different nutrition policy. But it’s hard to imagine that they could be worse.