If dance is part of people’s culture, so is dressing habit. So is eating habit. My food habit is my culture. How can it become anti-culture or anti-religious?
Our human evolution has passed many stages, from homo erectus to cave man to modern day homo sapiens. These beings lived on fruits and roots, flowers and flesh all along. They ate whatever was available to them. They hunted and killed animals. Before they discovered the technique of fire they ate raw flesh of whatever animals they could lay hands on because they had to survive. There were no religious deities or deity-inspired vigilante zealots to dictate to them what to eat or what not to eat.
Humans created their own gods to find answers to events the meaning of which they could not comprehend. Natural calamities like thunderstorm and lightening, flood and famine, sickness and death were incomprehensible to their undeveloped brain. Looking for scientific answers was beyond their intellectual or mental power. Newton was yet to get under an apple tree for a relaxed moment. Hence, in all simplicity, they erected stones and prayed to the mud and stone figures. They gave them names. For them they were gods and goddesses with extraterrestrial powers to quell men’s fears and quench their aspirations. Gods and goddesses increased in number and people found safety and security on paying obeisance to them. People also devised various means to please and propitiate them through sacrifices and animals and even humans.
As people’s brain developed they began to devise more ingenious ways of relating to these gods and goddesses. Buildings were erected to house them and they were called prayer halls, worshipping places or sanctuaries. Particular classes and castes were formed to take over administration and to conduct religious ceremonies. Priests and pujaris enjoyed the best part of sacrificial offerings like the thigh of the sacrificed animal. The entrails and the leftovers went to be auctioned out to the general public. Thus the upper class administrators and upper caste pujaris had their fill with the best portion of all animal flesh and other sacrificial offerings. If someone stole a cow and ate it and if he was caught, the divine sanction was perhaps a chicken or a calf as a sacrificial offering.
Tribal communities made no distinction among animals. During their annual festive celebrations, after offering the best of their animals to their deities on days of celebration, they would cut and eat them. Such animals included all varieties of animals before they created religious structures and sanctions.
Today, even as we have become ‘civilized’ and ‘enlightened’, some of us dictate terms to people about what to eat and what not. Fundamentalism in the name of preserving and protecting certain religious mores and practices has invaded the culture of groups who do not subscribe to the ways of the ‘enlightened’ elite. Vigilante predators become self-proclaimed protectors of fundamentalism and fanaticism.
Instead, we need today vigilante groups for peace, inter-religious harmony, inter-racial collaboration, and inter-communal fellowship. One only hopes sanity will prevail in the world before we get consumed by hate ideologies.