A flush of pleasure came over me when I heard that Bombay is becoming increasingly vegetarian-friendly. Yes, we brutish fruitivores are abusing the underprivileged meat-eaters of the world who just can’t find any meat any more:

House hunters in Bombay increasingly are being asked: “Do you eat meat?” … “Some people are very strict. They won’t sell to a nonvegetarian even if he offers a higher price than a vegetarian…”

Suburban supermarkets have been known to dump their non-veg foods overnight because of complaints from shoppers. “We cleared our shelves of tuna tins and frozen chicken. We don’t keep any nonvegetarian items now,” said Neelam Ahuja, owner of the K-value supermarket. “Many customers don’t like non-veg, so we stopped stocking it…”

“It’s just not fair. It’s a monopoly by vegetarians,” said Kiran Talwar, 49, a prosthetics engineer who has seen vegetarianism take over restaurants and groceries all over his childhood neighborhood on posh Nepean Sea Road.

“If you step out to eat, there’s nothing for miles because everything around is veggie,” he said. [Link via SM]

That sound you hear is the world’s smallest Carnatic violin. Welcome to my world. I was once served three sprigs of parsley and an orange slice as a meal. In the restaurant’s defense, it was a Black Angus.

India’s vegetarian food labeling law means that everything vegetarian gets a prominent green dot, so telling veg from non-veg is a cinch. Restaurants in Bombay have menus with vegetarian sections easily as long as the list of meat entrees. The U.S. is way behind here.

Andrew Sullivan points us to a story suggesting that in the future, rather than eating animals raised in inhuman conditions, meat-eaters will be eating non-sentient slabs of flesh farmed on scaffolds, just like human tissues for medical transplants are today:

I live with major cognitive dissonance, since I have been largely persuaded that the way in which most animals are treated and harvested for meat is unethical at best and may even be one the great moral enormities of our time. When I think that pigs have the same intelligence and range of feelings that dogs have, and then think of what they are subjected to in factory farming, I feel I am morally delinquent in eating bacon. And yet I still do. [Link]

To those who object that the image is unappetizing, I say that if people are willing to eat mystery meat from abused animals pumped full of hormones and slaughtered unhygienically by machines, I’m quite sure they’ll eat something farmed in a room.

I will say though that a lot of the restrictions by Bombay landlords feel finicky and arbitrary — only Christians, no Christians, no actors, only MNC executives, and on and on.

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