I fed beef to a Hindu!
It was one of those silly careless mistakes that I make once in a while. I actually fed beef to a Hindu.
It all happened over the weekend at my colleague’s wedding. Its a Malay wedding so its held outside her house. She stays in a terrace house so they closed off the street.
Anyway, as per usual, they have rendang beef, lamb and chicken. My Indian colleague helped me reserved the table and I went to help her get the food. I took a bit of everything including the beef.
It was after an hour later when I released that she is Indian and she probably cannot take beef. I quickly apologised to her and she said its okay. And then went into this discussion about beef and the Indian society.
It turns out that her dad, her son and her are only three Indians in their family that eat beef. *phew, lucky me*.. and that her thoughts of Indian not eating beef is an old tradition and need not be followed in the modern society.
The reason is simple. Long ago, the cow is a treasure animal. It helps you in the padi field, pull your wagon and even its dung are used to light fire, patch up the family hut. Who would kill such a treasured animal just to eat it for a few days?
But nowadays, its different, the cows are raised in pasture and are most are raised to be eaten. Furthermore, they are already eating the sheeps, chickens so why not the cow?
As it turns out, anthropologists have done studies wrt to this issue, and it turns out that in simulated experiments, societies that eat their beast of burden are less likely to survive well after a famine or drought. Reason is quite straight foward actually. If you ate your cows that are used the till the land, when there famine is over and there are no cows left, you’ll continue staying hungry. But if the society has a taboo against eating such creatures, then more people may die, but more cows will also survive, so the society has a better chance of getting back on its feet. In some cases such taboo get enshrined in the religion.
This practice extends to almost all societies - not just Asian civilisations. In Western civilisations where the horse is usually the beast of burden, there is a strong taboo against eating horse meat. You can probably trace the distaste of Western society towards eating of dogs to the same root.
Just my 2 cents worth.. Care to comment?