Can I offer you a nice egg in this trying time?

An essay on eggs I guess

Hello! I’m Apoorva Sripathi, a writer, editor, and artist. If you think my work is valuable and would like to support me, follow 💌shelfoffering on Instagram, share this post, and consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you.

sorry but I will never eat soft scrambled eggs!!

It has taken me about three decades to choose to eat eggs for a meal. I surprised myself by choosing an egg breakfast on my recent flight to London: a masala cheese omelette served with an incredibly sticky tomato sauce and some potato wedges. There might have been a chicken sausage, I don’t remember very well. But the main part is that I survived. And I came out of that flight thinking two things – no more long distance relationship and, more importantly, that eggs are nice?

Maybe my dislike of eggs was preordained. I grew up, or rather was raised, vegetarian (and occasionally vegan) like my parents before me and their parents before them. Because this is the status quo in India – diets are informed by social construct, hierarchies, religion, caste, tradition, parents, and family. Those of us who claim we are vegans¹ “by choice” conveniently forget that the reason we are so because those who came before us decided our diets for us. It is a certain comfort zone and I can understand that as I have been there. But what I don’t understand is its false equivalence.

I remember someone I went to school with posting on Facebook a while back about not eating meat, and, in particular, eggs because they were a feminist, and that any woman who called themselves a feminist should do the same. As much as this made sense, I also found it wholly ridiculous that this person was vehemently (and by choice) entrenched in their oppressor caste practices that went against this feminism that they spoke about. But I understand the identity crisis that comes with being a meat-eating feminist; the rejection of meat that leads to gendered implications in the West via an episode of Seinfeld (what else) where Jerry says he’s not a meat eater prompting his date to go, “you’re not one of those–” and eventually Elaine echoing Jerry’s thoughts that “women don’t respect salad eaters”'; and the outdated thinking that meat must be the focus of the meal. My partner’s parents, fond of their Sunday roasts and their meat mains at restaurants, now opt for a mix of veggie and meat dishes. My partner who has been cooking for himself, and now us, mostly cooks vegan and vegetarian (with the odd mix of chicken nuggets and sausages every once in a while) meals for us.

It is true then that food practices mark ideological moments and also help elaborate and structure the way the world works. In The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine, author Dylan Clark writes how “food tends to recapitulate power relations” and thus, feminist praxis in punk critiques food as a site of repression. Clark also notes that punks identify the body as a place where hegemony is made and resisted and this as always brings me back to Bourdieu on taste – that food is incorporated into the body in class (and caste) -specific ways, making the body “the most indisputable materialization of class taste”. Why is it that tastes in food differentiate in this way?

It is too easy to ignore something that has always been present in front of us implicitly, and easier even to repackage it as something else that sounds convenient and admirable, like say ‘eating for the environment²’. This isn’t however an argument to eschew vegetarianism altogether because it is public knowledge that a collective move towards a plant-based diet is sustainable for both consumption and production.

But cultural contexts matter.

In a country like India, seen as a vegetarian utopia to outsiders, both vegetarianism and eating meat brings with it the politics of caste identity, lynching, and beef bans as well as cultural and political inequalities of power and which also essentialises the identities of both individuals and the groups they belong to. Both meat and those who eat meat are stigmatised as unclean or impure and are treated inferior to those who consume plant-based diets, which are seen as pure. The frequent meat bans and crackdowns on shops in a state like Uttar Pradesh doesn’t translate to a compassion towards animals or the environment, but is actually a move towards the creation of a ‘pure and aggressive Hindu identity’ that eventually manifests as mob violence against those who don’t fit the mould.

Analysing a 2019 Lancet study on global nutrition, The Wire reported that “food politics in India spearheads an aggressive new Hindu nationalism that has led to many of India's meat eating minority communities being treated as inferior”. This food hierarchy is created by folks belonging to the oppressor castes, to a vegetarian Hindu identity, i.e. those of us who have the access and the privilege to be able to eat meat (or otherwise) without any consequences while also being able to spin narratives around consumption. This is also an erasure of food culture and the reduction of a culture’s ‘cuisine’ into a singular entity. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the decision to constantly revoke eggs from midday lunches of school children in India. Even though eggs are a powerhouse of nutrition, cannot be adulterated, do not spoil easily, and are relatively easy to transport, they are routinely withdrawn from these lunches for fear of ‘offending’ Hindu religious beliefs and notions of ‘purity’.

Talk about purity, leads me to (specifically cow’s) milk – that white liquid which has been venerated as perfect and pure. For the Wellcome Collection’s series on milk, I wrote about milk’s ascension in India which was a result of postcolonial notions of progress, globalised industrialisation and nationalist nutrition guidance, and how its provenance of purity comes from the tenets in Hinduism that revere the cow as the mother-goddess. So the courtesy extended to milk as virtuous isn’t extended to beef or even eggs, even if both are proven to be more nutritious in a country that regularly languishes at the bottom of the Global Hunger Index while the National Family Health Survey reports places the nutritional status of children below 5 years of age as “worsening” and that chronic malnutrition has increased in 11 states.

So what is this special hatred of egg? My personal hatred was its strong smell and its annoyingly glamorous food porn ooziness³ (which I loathe from time to time, although it is equally mesmerising). I will still not touch a runny egg and prefer a hard scramble. But the specifically collective hatred lies in this notion of considering the egg as not vegetarian. This is bizarre because although the egg (and beef) and milk come from animals, one is commodified as divine, good, and pure, and the other is seen as impure and unclean.

This notion of egg as ‘non-vegetarian’ and milk as ‘vegetarian’ (even though it derives from an animal) exists only because of Hindu Brahminical ideas about the ‘purity’ of food, when nutrition should be the focus. The same caste purity paints India as a vegetarian nation, making meat morally problematic.

India’s war against animal products is then selective. The lynchings of Muslims, Adivasis, Dalits, and other oppressed castes and classes – widely considered the Other – are just a merciless expression of hate as well as a pathetic celebration of caste ‘purity’ by those who don’t eat beef against those who do which in turn abet in building a framework for a nationalist India. A plant-based lifestyle in a country like India has already been in effect, but valorising it for the wrong reasons will only rationalise and reinforce brutal social hierarchies already in place. Plant-based proteins and milks are lucrative business in an emerging economy like India but this conversation on consumption often excludes the voices of labourers who grow and harvest these foods.

I have had eggs previously of course. I remember eating a plain omelette with extreme amounts of powdered black pepper on a family holiday somewhere, upsetting some of the elders who were reluctant to accept this decision of mine to choose what was quickly deemed an ‘unacceptable meal’. I survived then but I rarely chose eggs after that. When I met my partner, an omnivore of dizzying proportions, we both quickly bonded over the fact that we hated eggs. What finally changed my outlook was a birthday breakfast at a guest house in Pondicherry where the cook made pepper⁴ scrambled eggs and served it over buttered croissants. I was hooked. I’ve long wanted to eat eggs because an egg is a flexible meal choice: you can have it for any meal and eat little else without losing your mind on what to make when the odds are stacked against you and boy are they stacked against you at times.

So perhaps individual consumption alone cannot save the planet because it seems as if we are so far removed from the food system. But the truth is that there is no social justice without food justice, without land access or without the ending of homogenisation of food cultures, which start with us as individuals. Every part of society participates in what we eat and how we eat. I’ve been asking myself more and more: where does responsibility for all of this ultimately lie?

I really don’t have the answer, but I can guess that a more inclusive path to health and nutrition would be easy access via public services that would benefit from looking at nutrient-dense foods that uphold local food systems rather than what is globally relevant. Maybe eggs aren’t the enemy here⁵ – after all we all did come from them.

1. Or vegetarians

2. I’m not saying here that one shouldn’t eat keeping the environment in mind but that local contexts matter immensely. I have moved to a country where the context is different and I’m a flexitarian for all intents and purposes.

3. The most I have graduated to liking a sunny side up is by eating a Haribo fried egg.

4. I think pepper is the solution to liking eggs?

5. This is more what I tell myself