Some consumers may choose veganism, or a pescatarian diet, but meat, eggs and milk, offer crucial sources of much-needed nutrients which cannot easily be obtained from plant-based foods, a new report issued on Tuesday by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says.
I don't know about "thousands of years" as in Vedic India meat was definitely consumed and animal sacrifices were performed for religious ceremonies:
https://theconversation.com/hinduism-and-its-complicated-history-with-cows-and-people-who-eat-them-80586
Even in modern day India the number of pure vegetarians doesn't constitute the majority:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-43581122
Yeah, despite what Hindutva folks say, the Vedic religion isn’t modern Hinduism. For that you have to see the Bhakti movement but that’s a different point.
Conducting research like this is always very hard, but those numbers are hilariously wrong. But I’m not interested in debating over vegetarianism in Indian.
To go back to the main point, such data, even if taken at face value, always ignores the fact that most meat-eating Indians only consume a meat-based dish once a week or once a month. That percentage is rising with the newer generations but it’s still very low.
So if that little meat consumption is what is considered “essential” then the goal should be to tell Americans and Europeans, who can’t go one meal with it, to eat less meat.
But instead what you see (in India, China etc.) is meat being used almost as a status symbol. It’s the worst excesses of capitalism, that is literally unsustainable for the world, but is being excused and rationalised under the guise of “essential nutrients.”
It’s bullshit.
So what are the numbers then? All the sources I see place it below 50%.
Did you even read the next line I wrote or just popped off?
Yeah I get it, you don't want to debate. I don't either, I just want to know what the numbers are. You said that what I cited was "hilariously wrong" but then left it at that. Help me out a little.
Most estimates put it at around 40% (declining in recent years) with around 10% of those also eating eggs. That is important because it is considered vegetarian elsewhere but not exactly so in India so if you want to accurate in your research and not just provide clickbait headlines for the BBC, you will have to look into stuff and see what people actually mean when they say they are vegetarian or not.
As I said, research like this is hard and you can choose to not trust the government if you wish, but then going by some US anthropologist quoted by the fucking BBC is completely bonkers. It’s literally better to just talk to any Indians you know and form estimates that way, while acknowledging that the kinds of Indians who get to emigrate are the richer sort who are more likely to consume meat.
And, again, the vast majority of people who consume meat don’t do so every meal, every day or anything close to that. Just eating it a few times a month is enough to be considered a regular meat-eater which I don’t have a problem with as a category, but for this topic of meat being essential for nutrition, is so fucking dishonest.
As for the Vedic stuff, you can already see the change form that period to modern day religo-cultural habits by the 4th century:
— Faxian, Chinese pilgrim to India (4th/5th century CE), A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms (translated by James Legge)
There was also an Indian economist in that study for what it's worth, which is why I thought it was at least somewhat credible. And like I said, based on other sources I've seen (you can find the references here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country#Estimates_and_Statistics) it's still below 50%, like I said. I was just curious.
I think one interesting study I have not seen but would be extremely useful is how many meals does the average Indian consume without meat compared to other developing countries and to the West. That would go a long way towards helping people understand how much meat is “essential”.