Cannibals and Kings (24 page)

If the cow more than the ox is the symbol of
ahimsa
, the sacredness of life, perhaps it is because the cow more than the ox is endangered by the sentiment that it is “useless.” During times of hunger the cow stands more in need of ritual protection than the draft oxen. Yet from the point of view of the resumption and continuity of the agricultural cycle the cow is actually more valuable than the male draft animal. Although it is not as strong as an ox, it can in emergencies pull the plow as well as someday produce replacements for animals that succumb to thirst and hunger. Under duress, therefore, the cow must be treated as well as—if not better than—the ox, and that is probably why it is the principal object of ritual veneration. Mohandes Gandhi knew what he was talking about when he said Hindus worshiped the cow not only because “she gave milk, but because she made agriculture possible.”

Why beef came to be forbidden flesh in India cannot fully be explained unless one can also account for its not becoming taboo in the other early centers of state formation. One possibility is that Indian farmers were more
dependent on irregular monsoon rainfall than were farmers in other regions. This may have made it more urgent to protect cows and oxen during times of hunger. In Egypt and Mesopotamia, where cattle were venerated and their sacrifice prohibited in late dynastic times, beef continued to be eaten. But both Egypt and Mesopotamia, unlike India, were totally dependent on irrigation agriculture and never had large numbers of farmers who relied on drought-resistant cattle to get through the dry season.

China presents a more difficult problem. Although they also need ox-drawn plows, the Chinese never developed a cow-love complex. On the contrary, female cattle in China have long been held in rather low esteem. This is reflected in Chinese cooking. Whereas in northern India the traditional cuisine relies heavily on milk or milk products and the basic cooking fat is clarified butter, or ghee, Chinese recipes never call for milk, cream, or cheese and the basic cooking fat is lard or vegetable oil. Most adult Chinese have a strong dislike for milk (although ice cream has gained increasing popularity in recent years). Why are the Indians milk-lovers and the Chinese milk-haters?

One explanation for the Chinese aversion to milk is that they are physiologically “allergic” to it. Adult Chinese who drink quantities of milk generally get severe cramps and diarrhea. The cause is not really an allergy but a hereditary deficiency in the ability of the intestines to manufacture the enzyme lactase. This enzyme must be present if the body is to digest lactose, the predominant sugar found in milk. Between 70 and 100 percent of Chinese adults have a lactose deficiency. The trouble with this explanation is that many Indians—between 24 and 100 percent, depending on the region—also have a lactase deficiency. And so do most human
populations, Europeans and their American descendants being the exception. Moreover, all the unpleasant consequences of lactase deficiency can easily be avoided if milk is drunk in small quantities or if it is consumed in any one of a number of soured or fermented forms such as yogurt or cheese, in which the lactose is broken down into less complex sugars. In other words, lactase deficiency is only a barrier to the drinking of large quantities of milk American-style. It can’t explain the aversion to butter, sour cream, cheese, and yogurt—all of which are conspicuously absent from Chinese cuisine.

What stands out in the comparison of Chinese and Indian ecosystems is the virtual absence in China of the cow as a farm animal. John Lasson Buck’s authoritative survey of pre-Communist Chinese agriculture showed that in northern China there were on the average .05 oxen but less than .005 cows per farm. This indicates a cattle sex ratio of more than 1,000 males to 100 females, as compared with a ratio of between 210:100 and 150:100 in the Central Gangetic Plain and 130:100 for all of India. This difference reflects the fact that the cow had virtually no role in the northern Chinese domestic economy other than to breed oxen, which explains at least one aspect of the Chinese distaste for milk: there were no cows around the typical northern Chinese village. No cows, no milk, no chance to acquire a taste for milk products.

The livestock picture in China was always characterized by considerable regional variation in the use of large draft and pack animals. In the north central and northeastern provinces the sum of all the horses, donkeys, and mules was almost as great as the number of cattle. This contrasts with the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal in the Ganges Valley, where
horses, donkeys, and mules occur in insignificant numbers.

The greatest difference between the Chinese and Indian livestock situations, however, lies in the vast number of pigs in China and the virtual absence of pigs from most of the Gangetic Plain. Buck estimated that on the average each farm in northern China had .52 pigs. A member of a recent delegation to China, G. F. Sprague of the Department of Agronomy of the University of Illinois, estimates that China produced between 250 to 260 million swine in 1972. This is more than four times the amount produced in the United States, “a nation noted for extensive swine production.” If the Chinese produced these animals the way they are produced in the United States, Sprague writes, they “would represent a severe drain on the available food supply.” But there is little resemblance between the production practices in the two countries. Swine production in the United States depends upon providing the animals with corn, soya meal, vitamin and mineral supplements, and antibiotics. In China swine are raised primarily as a household enterprise and, like cows in India, are “fed on waste materials not suitable for human food; vegetable refuse, ground and fermented rice hulls, sweet potato and soya bean vines, water hyacinths and so forth.” Just as Indian cows are valued for their manure, so Chinese swine are valued “almost as much for manure as for their meat.” In other words, the pig is and was the main village scavenger for the Chinese. It provided them with crucial supplements of fats and proteins and much-needed fertilizer just as the Indians derived essentials from their village scavenger, the cow. With one big difference: since the pig cannot be killed, it has to be eaten if it is to serve as a source of dietary fats and proteins. This means that as long as swine filled the niche
of village scavenger, the Chinese would never accept a religion such as Islam, which specifically prohibits the consumption of pork.

But why did the Chinese adopt the pig as the village scavenger while the Indians adopted the cow? Several factors were probably involved. First of all, the Gangetic Plain is less desirable as a habitat in which to rear pigs than is the Yellow River Basin. The fierce spring heat and the recurrent droughts to which the zebu cattle breeds have adapted render the moisture-loving pig a risky investment. In Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest food-producing state, 88 percent of the rainfall occurs in four months, while average daily high temperatures in May and June hover well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Northern China, on the other hand, has cool springs, moderate summers, and no marked dry season.

Another important factor is the comparative availability of grazing lands on which traction animals can be reared. China, unlike India, has a large area that is suitable for pasturing traction animals and that cannot be used for growing food crops. In China only 11 percent of the total land area is under cultivation, while in India almost 50 percent of the total area is cropland. According to Buck, the northern spring wheat region of China contains “considerable public grazing land where low rainfall and broken topography make cultivation difficult.” By contrast, less than 2 percent of the total cropland area of the Central Gangetic Plain is permanent pasture or grazing land. Thus in India the breeding of the basic traction animal had to take place in zones that were already tightly packed with human beings—zones lacking nonarable lands suitable for forage. The traction animal, therefore, had to be fed primarily on waste products such as those available to a village scavenger. In other words, the traction animal
and the scavenger had to be one and the same species. And it had to be cattle, because neither horses, donkeys, nor mules could perform satisfactorily in the blistering heat and aridity of the monsoon climate, while water buffalo were useless to farmers who lacked irrigation.

Perhaps the best way to view the treatment of animals in India as opposed to China is in terms of different phases of a single great convergent process of intensification. Neither China nor India could afford large-scale exploitation of animals primarily for flesh or dairy products because of the immense human population densities and the severe caloric losses entailed in animal husbandry carried out on arable lands. In pre-Communist China the rural population lived on a diet that derived 97.7 percent of its calorie ration from farm plant foods and only 2.3 percent from animal products—mainly pork. The species used primarily as draft animals were seldom eaten in rural China, any more than they were eaten in India. Why, then, wasn’t beef prohibited by a religious taboo?

In fact, there was such a taboo in some regions. No less an authority than Mao Tse-tung made the following observations when he was in Hunan:

Draught-oxen are a treasure to the peasants. As it is practically a religious tenet that “Those who slaughter cattle in this life will themselves become cattle in the next,” draught oxen must never be killed. Before coming to power, the peasants had no way of stopping the slaughter of cattle except the religious taboo.

And T. H. Shen writes:

The butchering of cattle for beef is against Chinese tradition. It is only near the large cities that any cattle are butchered to furnish meat, and then it is done when they are no longer needed on the farms.

While both China and India have suffered the effects of millennia of intensification, the process seems to have been carried to the greater extreme in India. Chinese agriculture is more efficient than Indian agriculture primarily because of the greater area cultivated under irrigation—40 percent of Chinese croplands versus 23 percent of Indian croplands. Average yields per acre of rice are therefore twice as high in China as in India. Given the viability of the pig, donkey, mule, and horse in China, and the topographical and climatic factors of production, intensification did not reach levels necessitating a total ban on the slaughter of animals for meat. Instead of milking their traction animals, the Chinese slaughtered their pigs. They settled for a little less animal protein in the form of meat than they could have gotten in the form of milk—had they used the cow rather than the pig in the scavenger niche.

Hindus and Westerners alike see in the meat-eating taboos of India a triumph of morals over appetite. This is a dangerous misrepresentation of cultural processes. Hindu vegetarianism was a victory not of spirit over matter but of reproductive over productive forces. The very same material process that promoted the spread of empty-handed religions in the West, the end of animal sacrifice and redistributive feasts, and the interdiction of the flesh of such domestic species as the pig, horse, and donkey led India inexorably in the direction of religions that condemned the eating of all animal flesh. This did not happen because the spirituality of India surpassed the spirituality of other regions; rather, in India the intensification of production, the depletion of natural resources, and the rise in the density of population were pushed further beyond the limits of growth than anywhere else in the preindustrial world except for the Valley of Mexico.

In the 4,000 years between the appearance of the first states and the beginning of the Christian era, world population rose from about 87 million to 225 million. Almost four-fifths of the new total lived under the dominion of the Roman, Chinese Han, and Indian Gupta empires. This world total conceals the fact that the density of population in the core area did not continue to rise without check during that 4,000-year period. The demographic history of the early empires does not support the crude Malthusian notion that human population growth is an ever-present historical trend. Stationary populations were as much the rule in ancient empires as they were during the paleolithic era. There was a limit to how many people and animals could be packed into the great river valleys of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China. After the stage of functional vegetarianism had been reached, population density remained constant or even declined. Of course, outside the core areas population continued to increase as larger empires and more secondary states came into existence. But one by one the core regions seem to have reached their ecological limit of growth.

According to Kingsley Davis, the population of India as a whole had leveled off by 300
B.C
. and did not begin to expand until the eighteenth century. Karl Butzer estimates that in Egypt the population of the Nile
Valley quadrupled between 4000
B.C
. and 2500
B.C.
, the apex of the period in Egyptian history known as the Old Kingdom. Then it remained virtually stationary for over a thousand years. In 1250
B.C.
it rose to a new peak, which was only about 1.6 times the mark set in the Old Kingdom, and just before the beginning of the Greco-Roman period it fell back once more to the Old Kingdom level. Under Roman rule it peaked again at a point slightly more than twice that of the Old Kingdom, but by the end of the Roman Empire in 500
B.C
. it had fallen below the figure for 3,000 years earlier. Our best information comes from China, where census data covering a span of over 2,000 years can be consulted. Hans Bielenstein’s authoritative study shows that for the period
A.D.
2 to
A.D
. 742 China’s overall population remained close to 50 million, with a maximum of 58 million and a minimum of 48 million. More significantly, there were marked declines in the original core areas of the Han Dynasty. The Great Plain of the Yellow River, for example, had a population of 35 million in
A.D.
2. This fell to 25 million in
A.D.
140, rose to 31 million in 609 and fell again to 23 million in 742. Discounting increments brought about by the conquests of new territories, China’s rate of population growth remained close to zero for the better part of two millennia. (After 1450 the introduction of new varieties of rice, sweet potatoes, and American Indian maize made it possible for Chinese agricultural methods to support much denser populations than in earlier periods.)