That makes a lot of sense to me, yes, and I do agree. Another point comes to mind - my cultural background equates food with love and with identity. Okay, it's more complicated than that, but, you know, that's the gist of it: Indians use food as offerings like prasad, and langar, and alcohol isn't as normalised, so food serves as a social lubricant in addition to playing such a major religious role (and then, as my cousin Sunny says, our parents are just one generation away from scarce food and tell us to eat constantly because they love us - because they were not students/young adults who had as much food as they wanted, and they want us to be).
So, refusing food - even for reasons which seem quite mundane, like vegetarianism - isn't something that can be done as easily as it could be here, I think. There isn't a mental background against which you can place vegetarianism in the Western sense, because an individual's food choices are so heavily intertwined with the cultural structure.
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2009-11-05 07:34 pm (UTC)Another point comes to mind - my cultural background equates food with love and with identity. Okay, it's more complicated than that, but, you know, that's the gist of it: Indians use food as offerings like prasad, and langar, and alcohol isn't as normalised, so food serves as a social lubricant in addition to playing such a major religious role (and then, as my cousin Sunny says, our parents are just one generation away from scarce food and tell us to eat constantly because they love us - because they were not students/young adults who had as much food as they wanted, and they want us to be).
So, refusing food - even for reasons which seem quite mundane, like vegetarianism - isn't something that can be done as easily as it could be here, I think. There isn't a mental background against which you can place vegetarianism in the Western sense, because an individual's food choices are so heavily intertwined with the cultural structure.
omg tl;dr. sorry.