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Eating is the elemental activity we share with all living beings. It’s a process of providing food – fuel needed to sustain the physiological engine that is the body. The body needs carbohydrates for energy, proteins for growth and repair, fats for multiple physiological functions and vitamins and minerals for maintaining health.

Yet between the body’s need for nourishment and the food that finally reaches one’s plate lies an entire social world comprising income, caste, religion, gender, geography, culture, state policy and, increasingly, corporate power.

It is this distance between what the human body needs and what society permits, which constitutes the subject matter of Sylvia Karpagam’s The Meat of the Matter: How the Politics of Food Shapes Our Health (Harper Collins, 2026). As a public health doctor, researcher and activist, she is uniquely qualified to write a book that provides scientific facts about food and nutrition and explains its sociology and political economics in the most accessible manner.

‘The Meat of the Matter: How the Politics of Food Shapes Our Health’ by Sylvia Karpagam (Harper Collins, 2026).

Beginning with apparently straightforward questions of nutrition, the book gradually moves into much more contentious terrain: vegetarianism and its claims to moral and nutritional superiority, the politics of beef, exclusion in the mid-day meal programme, corporate influence over food and finally the need to learn – and unlearn – what we think we know about nutrition.

Today, when the Hindutva forces seek to hegemonise every sphere of social life, this book assumes particular importance to liberate food from their clutches to serve the needs of multitude.

The body has no caste

The initial chapters of the book explain proteins and fats; vitamins and minerals and their importance to human body. This scientific groundwork is necessary to understand the nutritional situation in India and the politics around it in later chapters. This politics thrives by blurring the boundary between nutritional evidence and cultural beliefs which are notoriously linked to caste, religion and notions of purity and pollution.

More secularly, the discussion on nutrition tends to abstract food away from material conditions of people. The question before a large population in India is not as much to know nutritionally optimal food as to choose the food they can afford. Protein, milk, fruit, vegetables, eggs, fish and meat compete with rent, transport, education, healthcare and every other demand on a meagre household income. Dietary diversity consequently becomes a question of class long before it becomes a question of nutritional knowledge.

But class is only one determinant. In India, like any other thing, food carries the additional burden of caste. Caste has historically regulated occupation, marriage as well as commensality – who may eat with whom, who may accept food from whom, who may cook for whom and which foods signify purity or pollution. The apparently private act of eating thus belongs to a much larger system of social classification. Food becomes a means through which hierarchy enters everyday life.

Karpagam’s great merit lies in bringing nutritional science into confrontation with this socio-political reality.

The myth of the innocent vegetarian

Karpagam goes on debunking myths associated with food. One of the big myths brazenly promoted by the current regime is about vegetarianism. The provocative title of one chapter, “The Innocent Vegetarian”, marks one of the book’s principal targets. People may choose vegetarian food for religious, ethical, cultural, economic or personal reasons. But what the myth does is to elevate vegetarianism to a moral and cultural norm and consequently undermines dietary practices of the majority.

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