Eating is the elemental activity we share with all living beings. It’s a process of providing food – fuel needed to sustain the physiological engine that is the body. The body needs carbohydrates for energy, proteins for growth and repair, fats for multiple physiological functions and vitamins and minerals for maintaining health.Yet between the body’s need for nourishment and the food that finally reaches one’s plate lies an entire social world comprising income, caste, religion, gender, geography, culture, state policy and, increasingly, corporate power.It is this distance between what the human body needs and what society permits, which constitutes the subject matter of Sylvia Karpagam’s The Meat of the Matter: How the Politics of Food Shapes Our Health (Harper Collins, 2026). As a public health doctor, researcher and activist, she is uniquely qualified to write a book that provides scientific facts about food and nutrition and explains its sociology and political economics in the most accessible manner.‘The Meat of the Matter: How the Politics of Food Shapes Our Health’ by Sylvia Karpagam (Harper Collins, 2026).Beginning with apparently straightforward questions of nutrition, the book gradually moves into much more contentious terrain: vegetarianism and its claims to moral and nutritional superiority, the politics of beef, exclusion in the mid-day meal programme, corporate influence over food and finally the need to learn – and unlearn – what we think we know about nutrition.Today, when the Hindutva forces seek to hegemonise every sphere of social life, this book assumes particular importance to liberate food from their clutches to serve the needs of multitude.The body has no casteThe initial chapters of the book explain proteins and fats; vitamins and minerals and their importance to human body. This scientific groundwork is necessary to understand the nutritional situation in India and the politics around it in later chapters. This politics thrives by blurring the boundary between nutritional evidence and cultural beliefs which are notoriously linked to caste, religion and notions of purity and pollution.More secularly, the discussion on nutrition tends to abstract food away from material conditions of people. The question before a large population in India is not as much to know nutritionally optimal food as to choose the food they can afford. Protein, milk, fruit, vegetables, eggs, fish and meat compete with rent, transport, education, healthcare and every other demand on a meagre household income. Dietary diversity consequently becomes a question of class long before it becomes a question of nutritional knowledge.But class is only one determinant. In India, like any other thing, food carries the additional burden of caste. Caste has historically regulated occupation, marriage as well as commensality – who may eat with whom, who may accept food from whom, who may cook for whom and which foods signify purity or pollution. The apparently private act of eating thus belongs to a much larger system of social classification. Food becomes a means through which hierarchy enters everyday life.Karpagam’s great merit lies in bringing nutritional science into confrontation with this socio-political reality.The myth of the innocent vegetarianKarpagam goes on debunking myths associated with food. One of the big myths brazenly promoted by the current regime is about vegetarianism. The provocative title of one chapter, “The Innocent Vegetarian”, marks one of the book’s principal targets. People may choose vegetarian food for religious, ethical, cultural, economic or personal reasons. But what the myth does is to elevate vegetarianism to a moral and cultural norm and consequently undermines dietary practices of the majority.Also read: Meat Consumption and Spending Rise: Eight in 10 Indians Ate Meat in 2021India is routinely represented, both domestically and abroad, as a predominantly vegetarian civilisation. This is a big lie. As per India’s own National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019–21) data, 83.4% of men and 70.6% of women eat non-vegetarian food daily, weekly or occasionally – up from the previous 2015–16 round. With Karpagam’s explanation how milk and milk products are animal sourced foods, the entire discourse may rather collapse.Even going by the conventional notions, the country’s actual food culture is extraordinarily diverse. Dietary practices vary across regions, castes, religions, tribal communities, occupations and ecological conditions. The image of an essentially vegetarian India privileges tiny but hegemonic Brahminical castes.Scholars have established how this representation was historically constructed and normalised. The scriptures of Brahminism are replete with evidence of cattle sacrifice and the consumption of beef by the Brahmins. The practice was gradually abandoned and adopted vegetarianism, in response to the Buddhist ethic of ahimsa and the challenge it posed to Brahmanical authority. It is from here that food got associated with caste.Vegetarianism, with its association with notions of ritual purity among dominant castes, assumed prestige and conversely meat-eating became a mark of inferiority. The food practice thus got casteised. Projection of India as a vegetarian country is a mere reflection of hegemonic culture of Brahmanism.The issue as Karpagam explains is the attempt to confer moral superiority upon one dietary regime and then convert that superiority into social prescription. The strongest argument of The Meat of the Matter is consequently not a case for eating meat. It is a case against allowing ideology to decide nutrition.When beef becomes more than foodNowhere is the transformation of food into ideology clearer than in the politics of beef unleashed by the current regime. “To beef or not to beef” is a matter of ideology. The cow occupies a sacred position within sections of Hindus, but beef has historically been consumed by other communities, including Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims and Christians. Cattle are simultaneously religious symbols, agricultural assets, sources of livelihood, commodities and food. The entire agrarian economics of rural India depends on cattle but its religious association sourced the divisive politics at a huge cost to the nation.Do the religious beliefs of one section of society give it the right to determine what others may eat? Seen this way, beef politics becomes a question of citizenship and power. And this politics has produced legal restrictions, vigilantism and lethal violence against people involved in cattle trading, transportation, leather work and meat production – predominantly Muslims and Dalits.The Mid-Day Meal and the paradox of exclusionIndia’s mid-day meal programme is premised on an important principle that hunger and malnutrition should not prevent school children from learning. Properly implemented, a common meal can do more than provide calories and nutrients.Children of different castes eating together can potentially challenge inherited practices of commensal segregation. Yet precisely because the meal enters a caste-structured society, it can reproduce the exclusions it is supposed to overcome.The chapter, “Mid-day Meal: A Recipe for Exclusion”, appears to capture this paradox particularly well. Questions over whether eggs should be served, what foods are considered culturally acceptable, who prepares meals and whether children will eat food cooked by members of particular castes reveal that a nutrition programme cannot escape the society in which it operates.The egg is an especially revealing example. It is relatively inexpensive, easily distributed and nutritionally dense. Yet decisions about providing eggs in school meals have repeatedly become entangled with vegetarianism of the regime. It is projected as the issue of sentiment of the vegetarian children as though until then they did not have sentiments to be hurt. Actually, this sentiment business had reached even the higher education institutions and created an explosive situation before it was settled as a compromise.Also read: West Bengal Mid-Day Meal Row: What Came First, the Egg or the Hypocrisy?The politics becomes particularly visible in states where eggs have been excluded from, or withdrawn from, school meals. Maharashtra withdrew state funding for eggs in 2025, Goa abandoned their introduction after opposition from vegetarian groups and West Bengal’s 2026 proposal for vegetarian school meals again put the issue at the centre of controversy.Karpagam cited a Karnataka example wherein Akshay Patra Foundation (APF), an organisation associated with ISKCON was assigned to provide mid-day meals to schools. In the name of sattivik bhojan, it eliminated onion, garlic, eggs, fish, meat, etc. When there was a public uproar, the National Institute of Nutrition was asked to assess the quality of food being provided by APF.This institute, without visiting a single school, issued sweeping statements approving the food being supplied based on the paper menu. This is one of the examples of how the state hollows out the institutions meant for exercising check on its excesses.From sacred food to corporate foodIf religious and caste ideology constituted one form of power over the plate, the market constitutes another. In the chapter “Food Agenda Goes Corporate”, Karpagam turns to the corporate-led campaign for plant-based foods and its convergence with the state’s growing preference for vegetarianism. The EAT–Lancet Commission posed an apparently innocuous question: can a healthy diet for a projected ten billion people be achieved within planetary boundaries?Its answer called for a global shift towards predominantly plant-based diets, with India repeatedly held up as an example. The proposed “planetary health” diet has gained international traction through partnerships involving the UN, agri-food corporations and investors in vegan products, some of whom advocate an end to livestock agriculture.The case for this shift is couched in the language of science and planetary necessity: livestock’s greenhouse-gas emissions, land and water use, biodiversity loss, methane and other agricultural emissions; the health risks associated with excessive consumption of red and processed meat; resource efficiency; and global dietary inequality.Karpagam questions whether a global dietary prescription based largely on aggregate environmental and health considerations can adequately accommodate the radically different nutritional deficits, food cultures, ecological conditions and economic circumstances of the Global South. Although EAT–Lancet itself stops short of advocating vegetarianism, the scientific authority of its arguments can lend credibility to a broader ideological push towards it.Karpagam challenges several claims that underpin this corporate intervention: that plant milk is inherently healthier, easier to digest and more environmentally friendly than cattle milk; that because humans are no longer wild animals, they need not kill and eat animals; that those requiring additional nutrition should necessarily be given animal-sourced foods; and that, because animals are sentient, killing them for food is morally wrong. Her larger point is that such claims cannot simply be elevated into universal nutritional truths.The plant-sourced food is actually a mass produced ultra-processed foods by corporate food industry. It does not care for consumer needs. It can manufacture them through advertising, packaging, branding and claims about health and convenience. The danger is that the displacement of traditional dietary diversity by mass-produced, ultra-processed alternatives can itself become a new source of nutritional insecurity.Also read: The True Cost of a Vegetarian Menu at the BRICS SummitKarpagam emphasises that malnutrition has a political economy beyond knowledge or ignorance about how it works. What crops does agricultural policy support? What foods are available through the public distribution system? What does a nutritious diet cost relative to wages? Which foods receive subsidies and which industries influence public policy? What foods are marketed to children? And what happens when diverse food cultures give way to homogenised, packaged consumption? These are uncomfortable questions about malnutrition that remain unasked.Learning and unlearningThe final chapter, “Learning (and Unlearning) Nutrition and the Way Forward,” identifies India’s greatest nutritional deficit as lack of dietary diversity. A healthy diet should include adequate quantities of dairy, eggs, meat, poultry, fish, vegetables, pulses, legumes and fats alongside cereals and millets. It calls for recognising how far current food practices are shaped by caste and prejudice, that humans are omnivorous and require a balanced diet and that nutritious food must be made affordable.Unlearning means questioning inherited assumptions, particularly about vegetarianism. It means challenging the notion of India as naturally vegetarian, separating religious prescriptions from nutritional science and recognising that dietary choice means little without economic access. Poverty, intra-household inequality, maternal nutrition, sanitation, public health, food prices and access to diverse diets all matter, as do the environmental and ethical concerns surrounding industrial meat production.Science can establish nutritional requirements and the nutrients different foods provide; it cannot prescribe a universal diet for a country as culturally, ecologically and economically diverse as India.In conclusionThe book assumes a wide canvas, moving from physiology and micronutrients to caste, Hindutva, school meals, public policy and corporate capitalism. It presents adequate data and scholarly findings in support of its arguments in a lucid manner, which enhances its value particularly in the present political paradigm.One may be tempted, however, to seek a little more analytical depth at places. For instance, “vegetarianism” encompasses religious, caste-based, ethical, health-oriented and economically compelled practices that are not one category. Likewise, “meat” ranges from traditional and locally produced animal foods to ecologically damaging industrial production; defending the nutritional value of animal-source foods need not mean endorsing every form of meat production.The corporate dimension could also be pursued further: if caste and religion regulate food through purity and identity, capital increasingly shapes it through affordability, advertising, processing and market concentration. Both can constrain meaningful dietary choice. These qualifications are due more to the enormity of the terrain the book opens up than being any of its shortcomings.The Meat of the Matter raises questions about who decides what we eat. Will it be family, caste, religion, state, nutritionist, corporation or the purchasing power in one’s pocket? While the privileged can turn preference into lifestyle, the poor eat what they can afford. While dominant communities can elevate their preferences into cultural norms, marginalised communities may find their food stigmatised. Meanwhile, corporations manufacture desires while governments determine what public programmes provide.Anand Teltumbde is former CEO of PIL and professor at IIT Kharagpur and GIM, Goa. He is also a writer and civil rights activist. This speech is republished here with his permission.