Food and Family

Generational Conditioning

I was invited to Lunch at Jyoti’s house, and her son and daughter were also there. As I sat with Jyoti, chatting about her experience being a vegetarian in India, the topic of caste came up. If this were part of a TV script, this is what it would look like:

Lunch Scenes

Delinking and Relinking

Religion and Caste

Vegetarianism in India has been linked to religion, specifically Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and many scholars recognize the modern-day salience of religious practices on the diet (Sen 2014; Nath 2010; Davidson 2003; Yang 1980). Seeing as all my participants have Hindu ancestry, I hope to consider the topic of caste and food briefly, but in a diasporic context. Caste is certainly a charged subject in the subcontinent. During her presentation at the Caste and Corporeality conference, Kanjilal said that caste has everything to do with vegetarianism. She argues that even if Brahmins vocalize their reason for being vegetarian as something other than religious motivation, the true underlying reason for such a diet is always because of learned caste rules (Goody et al. 2024). How does this translate in an Indian diasporic context? Many of my participants confessed that Brahmins tend to be vegetarian, and deviating from that diet can become a source of family gossip or scrutiny. Kumar shared that he never told his grandparents about trying meat as he didn’t want to cause them unnecessary discomfort. Savitri shared that in the Indian diaspora, heads turn when people from Brahmin families decide to start eating meat. Interestingly, most of my participants said that even though their relatives in India were more observant of caste rules, it has no place in their immigrant lives. Savitri further shared that she does not care to know someone’s caste as it is irrelevant. The reality for many of my participants is that their grandparents or parents practice/d Hinduism as Brahmins and observed a strict vegetarian diet, not even eating eggs. It follows that they were conditioned to be vegetarian through religious ideologies, but were not always conscious of the connection, as demonstrated in “Lunch Scenes” above.

Delinking

Meenakshi is highly self-aware of the religious and caste-based conditioning that gets passed on from generation to generation. She made the conscious decision to distance herself from caste-based ideologies but retain vegetarianism without any of the religious motivations. Bharti admits that growing up in India, she was religiously conditioned to believe that eating meat was a sin. As an adult in California, however, she educated herself on the meat industry and found a new ethical source of motivation to be a vegetarian. Is it possible, then, in a diasporic and even multi-cultural environment, to reconstruct what it means to be an Indian and vegetarian? Is it acceptable to say that learned caste rules do not support vegetarianism for my participants? As a student of Cultural Anthropology, it is not for me to judge whether what my participants say is true, whether they actually mean what they say, and whether they are truly self-aware of their religious ancestry. Neither is it my job to dispute Kanjilal’s argument on the fixedness of diet and caste. Instead, I include this section on caste to comment on how, for the South Indian immigrants I interviewed in California, their vegetarianism has been actively delinked from learned caste rules. Different generations can perform the same practice, but do it for different reasons. The reconstructed meaning and motivation for vegetarianism are what I’m most interested in.

Relinking

In the early stages of this project, based on the swath of literature I read, I expected that at least some of my participants, if not all, would locate their vegetarianism in religious beliefs or practices, but not a single participant cited religion as having a place in their dietary choices. Kumar, Bharti, and Meenakshi identified as being spiritual rather than religious. All the others expressed that they do not consider themselves religious but partake in Indian cultural activities like Diwali or visiting historical temples. While my participants are few and unrepresentative of the entire South Indian diaspora in California, it is worth delving into what their lived experiences can tell us about dietary motivations. Gayatri does not consider herself religious, yet growing up in India, she recounts joining her family for religious activities but treating them as something else:

“I don't really remember going to temples for praying. I mean, I would go with others [but] I was always more interested in the architecture of a temple more than going there to pray. And it's weird, because there'd always be some movie song running in my head when I would walk into the temple.”

In Gayatri’s story, I see how different generations can perform the same practice but do it for different reasons. Similarly, when thinking about diet, Gayatri continues to practice the vegetarianism that she was brought up with, but relocates her motivation to the discomfort of knowing that meat was once an animal running in the field.

The way I see it, my participants first dissected what Indian culture and diet were for them growing up, and chose to retain eating vegetarian food. As immigrants in California, they then found themselves relinking familiar eating practices to something that holds meaning in their lives: ethics, health, and spirituality.

Three tables set up for a family lunch

The Next Generation

For some of my participants, passing on a vegetarian food philosophy to their children was very important, however, many external elements determine how and if such a philosophy resonates with the next, local-born, generation. In Bharti’s case, her two daughters responded differently to following a vegetarian diet:

My kids were on board, saying, “Oh yeah, we love dogs, we love cats, I don’t want to kill animals” I told them it was not good to kill animals, and it didn’t feel right to me. I had the advantage of being brought up vegetarian, so I could do that. Interestingly my older daughter, I didn't know about this, but, when she was in daycare, that lady was giving her meat because she was asking for it when she was little. It was more of a white community, and it was common for them to eat meat. I don’t really blame that person, even though I told her I’d rather she not eat meat. If the child is not eating, I think she was just giving her…And later in life, my daughter started craving meat because her body was conditioned for around six or seven years. In high school, she became a non-vegetarian, and now she eats everything. In 10th grade she said, “Mom, I’m having these cravings, I want to eat meat.” She was surrounded by Taiwanese and Chinese, and they would all go for Korean barbecue, and I think it kind of triggered something in her because she has eaten it. I guess it’s like a sugar craving come back, or something like that. She went back to meat, and I was very disappointed. My younger one, she didn’t go to daycare as much. I had more control. I don’t think she has ever eaten meat. She is 18, so she can do whatever she wants, but we will see.

Eating or not eating meat seems to be understood as an overlapping process between the childhood environment, biological responses, and moral or mental ideologies. As a mother, Bharti shows us the familial conflicts that can arise around diet choice and how even within the same household there can be differing responses to the generational continuation of vegetarianism. While Bharti did not articulate her familial negotiations as a responsibility that is typically relegated to mothers, her experience resonates with Cassidy and El-Tom's understanding of motherhood and transnationalism (2021). They suggest that across the world, mothers take up the primary role of feeding the family at home and so “retain the power of food as a major pathway for negotiating membership to kin groups, communities, and nations. Such a role becomes more complex during times of…migration”(El-Tom and Cassidy 2021). In outsourcing her daughter’s feeding to a daycare provider, Bharti felt she had no choice but to relinquish control over the place of vegetarianism in her elder daughter’s life, as formative years lay a foundation for biological cravings and comfort foods.

For Gayatri, vegetarianism was more about developing her daughter's relationship with indian food and, by extension, providing a bridge for her to get along with her family back in India:

“If my daughter were to go to India and say “oh no I only eat pasta” it's not going to fly. I would constantly have to take her to a restaurant, and that would mean she wouldn’t have meal time at home. So she is not really spending time with others. For my family, sitting around a table and talking is a very integral part of what we do. I think the fact that my daughter now enjoys the Indian food that we eat at home makes a big difference. When I took her to India this summer, we were having this huge get-together at my cousin's house. We had about fifty family members come in, and every meal was a banana leaf feast. She had no problem sitting and eating from a banana leaf, eating all of these twenty-five different items served on the banana leaf. That made a big difference not just for her but the fact that when my cousins, uncle, and aunt saw her eating that way, somehow they felt like the ice was broken. They didn’t consider her as this NRI kid that they can’t relate to. She is very relatable. She becomes really relatable. I think that really helps in building that relationship.”

As a mother, Gayatri is aware of the competition that globalized cuisine puts up against culturally rooted home-cooked food. She is also aware that displaying and participating in cultural knowledge through food is the way to retain transnational relationships. Loewen, Loewen, and Shepherd’s theoretical approach to feeding and motherhood contextualizes Gayatri’s approach to food and family: “A mother’s sense of self depends on how she handles the social and cultural expectations of others…” (2021). As a South Indian immigrant in California with a first-generation daughter and extended family back in India, Gayatri is seen handling the expectations of people, set apart by time and space, through vegetarian food.

These family dynamics highlight that dietary identity is never constructed in a vacuum. It tussles and grabs for space within family units in various ways while being influenced by external environments outside the home. There is no one formula for the result of parental dietary control; neither is there one reason for accepting vegetarianism, even if all participants agree.

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