{"id":15946,"date":"2018-04-05T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-05T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2018\/04\/05\/the-myth-of-the-indian-vegetarian-nation\/"},"modified":"2018-04-05T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2018-04-05T12:00:00","slug":"the-myth-of-the-indian-vegetarian-nation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2018\/04\/05\/the-myth-of-the-indian-vegetarian-nation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Myth of the Indian Vegetarian Nation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/world-asia-india-43581122\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>INDIA, April 4, 2018 (BBC): A big myth is that India is a largely vegetarian country. But that&#8217;s not the case at all. Past &#8220;non-serious&#8221; estimates have suggested that more than a third of Indians ate vegetarian food. If you go by three large-scale government surveys, 23%-37% of Indians are estimated to be vegetarian. By itself this is nothing remarkably revelatory. But new research by US-based anthropologist Balmurli Natrajan and India-based economist Suraj Jacob, points to a heap of evidence that even these are inflated estimations because of &#8220;cultural and political pressures.&#8221; So people under-report eating meat &#8211; particularly beef &#8211; and over-report eating vegetarian food.<\/p>\n<p>Taking all this into account, say the researchers, only about 20% of Indians are actually vegetarian &#8211; much lower than common claims and stereotypes suggest. The government data shows that vegetarian households have higher income and consumption &#8211; are more affluent than meat-eating households. The lower castes and tribes-people are mainly meat eaters. According to the National Family Health Survey, the cities with the largest incidence of vegetarianism are Indore at 49%, Meerut 36%, and Delhi 30%. <\/p>\n<p>HPI Note: The least meat-consuming country in the world is Muslim-majority Bangladesh (4 kg\/year), the second is India, at 4.4 kg per person per year. For comparison, Americans eat 120 kg of meat a year an Australians 115. The third least meat-consuming country is Muslim Burundi, and the 4th Buddhist majority Sri Lanka. See https:\/\/www.worldatlas.com\/articles\/countries-who-consume-the-least-meat.htmlhttps:\/\/www.worldatlas.com\/articles\/countries-who-consume-the-least-meat.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source INDIA, April 4, 2018 (BBC): A big myth is that India is a largely vegetarian country. But that&#8217;s not,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15946\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}