As a child, I decided not to eat grass

They snicker when they introduce me as a vegetarian. They tell me I need animal proteins. Then I ask them why elephants, rhinos and gorillas eat only plants

Few people know that as a boy, I used to be bullied in school. Not much, but enough to scar me. The bully was, appropriately, called Bull Anand. He used to take particular pleasure in introducing me in gatherings saying, “This is Gopinath. He’s vegetarian.”

Everyone would laugh hysterically at seeing a real, twitching, trembling vegetarian.

Decades have passed and although I am now open to eating all kinds of meat, the truth is that in the privacy of my apartment when I am cooking for myself, what warms my soul the most is vegetarian food. 

At dinner outings, when I decline the rogan josh, someone will inevitably turn to me and say, always with civility, “Oh, I didn’t realise you were vegetarian.” As though I had inadvertently outed myself or revealed that I had lupus vulgaris.

“You do know that plants simply do not have all the proteins your body needs, don’t you?” someone well-meaning would say later, one-on-one. “Your body needs animal proteins.”

I’ve not usually had a clever answer to this, not knowing enough about nutritional science, but also being genetically a bit flat-footed with my repartees. These days, though, I have a great comeback and it goes like this— “Oh, really? Let me ask you—can you name the five strongest, most awesome animals on earth?”

That’s easy, they’d say. Elephant, horse, rhino, gorilla and buffalo. Maybe hippo, if you want six.

“Right,” I’d close in for the kill. “And what do they eat for animal proteins, sir?”

Strange but true. The largest, strongest animals we know are vegetarians. So—question of the day—why can’t we eat like them?

I’m not a dietician but my arithmetic is sound. When I add 2 and 2, I get 22 every time. Here are the facts—

For most of a century, the West has misled the world about what to eat, how to eat it and why. Claiming to be “evidence-based” and scientific, their dietary guidelines were heavily influenced by politics, economics, corporate lobbies and in some cases, just poor science.

For instance, in the 1950s, following the highly biassed work of a pushy scientist called Ancel Keys, cholesterol was labelled the cause of heart disease. Two years later, saturated fats became villains too, because they apparently raised cholesterol. 

The US Department of Agriculture introduced the Food Triangle, with its four “essential” food groups—proteins, carbohydrates, fats and sugars—and told the world how much to eat of each. 

The original Food Pyramid, created by nutrition professor Dr Louise Light, was reasonable and health-oriented, recommending sugar below 10 per cent of daily calories, limited refined carbohydrates, no more than 2-3 servings of grains a day, five to nine servings of fruits and veggies and quality proteins like eggs and nuts. Good fat sources like olive oil and flax seed were also encouraged. 

American grain farmers and meat producers didn’t like this. Their pressure led to a revised Food Pyramid that encouraged people to eat more grains, carbohydrates and meats—so that the farmers and corporations would sell what they made.

The new Food Pyramid has been taken as gospel worldwide for decades. Over the next half century, the USA became an obese nation, with diabetes and heart disease surging. But America ruled, and the world followed suit. Countries that had once followed sensible, traditional diets and practices based on locally grown produce, cultures and conditions, now suffer from the same ‘western’ diseases.

Recently, America quietly dropped cholesterol as a “substance of concern” but the world is still paying the price for decades of blind adherence. 

FYI, the new thing is intermittent fasting and boundless energy from ketogenic diets.

You’re still wondering about gorillas and grass. The truth is that a herbivore does not get its nutrients from the plants it eats. Grass and hay really don’t contain much nutrition; their nutrients are locked away in a hard-to-digest, long and winding molecule called cellulose.

The truth? Herbivores actually eat plants to feed the trillions of bacteria in their gut. Those bacteria grow juicy and fat eating the cellulose in the plants. The herbivore then eats those bacteria, now bursting with proteins, and grows giant and powerful.

This is why I swear by the food I learned to love as a boy. It was vegetarian, had centuries of Palakkad wisdom behind it, was cooked with love and kept me as fit as, say, Bull Anand, the school bully.

As for you, the chef recommends— Never listen to dietary recommendations, especially those coming from the West. Since when do you need a foreign consultant to tell you what to have for lunch?

Don’t believe anyone who goes on about animal proteins. Your stomach doesn’t get proteins from your food, it gets amino acids, the building blocks from which all proteins are made. Once it has those, it can assemble any protein it needs.

Practice looking down on non-vegetarians when introducing them. Like “This is Deepak. Ermmm, he eats meat.”

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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