There is absolutely no questioning. It’s as if the rational world so passé.

There are nutrients we can obtain only from animal sources. In other words, nature—or evolution—designed us to be omnivores.

children.
I wonder if an alternative approach is to frame it in terms of living harmoniously with nature. Humans are omnivores. Our jaws move both sideways and vertically; the length of our intestines and the acidity of our stomachs are optimized for an omnivorous diet.

This situation is unique to India, but one could generalize the idea that compassion for animals does not automatically translate to compassion for humans. Societies newly embracing vegetarianism or veganism could learn from the Indian experience.
But I digress. These are not arguments suitable for

independent of compassion for life. Historically, our society has been deeply inhumane to fellow human beings even when the dominant castes were vegetarian and certain animals were worshipped. Vegetarianism actually became another axis of purity and pollution, reinforcing caste discrimination.

My motivation for writing this post came from a colleague who was struggling to explain to his daughter that eating meat is fine. Since I never faced this issue myself, I haven’t developed a clear response.
At a social level, I can argue that vegetarianism in India is largely

These parents feel stuck. There is also a gendered dimension, where women avoid openly eating meat because it is seen as unfeminine. In few South Indian families, in fact, there is a clear dichotomy: a meat-eating husband and a vegetarian wife.

Some simply don’t care, while others even get angry at what they perceive as an attack on their humanity. But there are children who do feel guilty.
Then there are their parents: apologetic meat-eaters who believe meat makes them impure and therefore strictly observe multiple non-meat days.

It’s like class solidarity has been supplanted by identities. This is the present time. In the bygone era, the identity coupled with the gulf between the societies might have been too strong.

There was an article how White America was big on helping others when a large section of the people who required help were whites themselves. However, that empathy is no longer strong as the people who require help are overwhelmingly minorities of different ethnicities.

I suppose the Ideas of socialism and liberalism were still nascent. But it was a country of contradictions where the sense of colonial oppression lived along side manifest destiny.

Do you mean European lower classes grabbing land from native Americans?

by fragmenting society and inhibiting trust and kinship even among speakers of the same language, it prevented the emergence of cohesive linguistic nationalities—unlike in much of the Old World.