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Vegetarianism, for me, was a personal choice, one which arose, in part, out of my realization during those first visits to India in the mid-1980s that a nonmeat diet was even plausible. Had I not been a vegetarian (and, for some years, a pescatarian), my interest in what it meant to different people to eat meat in India would not have been piqued, as the earlier retelling of my dinner with Victoria-Rani suggests. Ironically—given the affinities I developed with my beef-eating interlocutors—it was also through conducting this research that I eventually switched, in late 2017, to a vegan diet. My constant internet searches for cattle- and beef-related information and academic papers had, presumably thanks to the search engines’ algorithms, also exposed me to numerous videos depicting the alleged cruelties of the dairy industry, which, in turn, alerted me to stories about the treatment of other animals. Although I never interrogated these sources with the same voracity that I would have applied to materials for an academic publication, they were enough to convince me—having already become inured to watching cattle being slaughtered in real life—that killing an animal was not necessarily the cruelest act one could perpetrate against it. Indeed, having seen at close quarters animals being killed in a village setting, I might have almost, had I still desired it, been convinced to eat their meat, at least in particular circumstances. Although this did not (yet) happen, it still felt incongruous not to eat meat while continuing to eat animals’ other products, and that is why I also stopped eating them after my return to the UK in September 2017.

Nevertheless, while culinary choices were inextricably intertwined with my research trajectory, not eating beef while working with beef eaters undeniably presented certain difficulties. Das, my research assistant and a Brahmin by birth, despite being a convert to Christianity who was married to a beef-eating Madiga woman, had always remained strictly vegetarian. There was a moment in December 2017 when, sitting in the corner of a cramped beef shop in Hyderabad, we were both struck by the apparent absurdity of our situation. The shop owner, as he answered my questions, continued to chop up the large hunk of meat on his block, his cleaver sweeping dramatically through the air and flecking us, as it did so, with fragments of bone and droplets of bovine blood. Das glanced toward me at one point and caught my eye. “How did we come to be doing this?” he asked sardonically, before shaking his head with slightly amused resignation. In truth, however, by then we were used to it. Whatever visceral reactions the sight and smell of raw meat might once have evoked for either of us, they had ceased to be a problem.

Our vegetarianism did, however, present other concerns.³⁵ First, it created a certain distance between us and some of our interlocutors. Another of the Hyderabad butchers we knew, for example, had, at one point, expressed an interest in inviting us to dine with him at his family home, a sure breakthrough in establishing lasting rapport. After Das told him we did not eat meat, however, the invitation was diplomatically and, it turned out, permanently, put on hold. It was not, I am fairly sure, given his subsequent manner, that he was offended. He had, after all, been very pleased to have the opportunity to offer his take on meat eating and cattle slaughter, and he continued to take pleasure in joining us to drink tea on the bench outside his shop and talk about his work. Rather, coming from a Muslim family of meat sellers who ate meat every day, my assumption was that he was now uncertain what he could feed us that would, at the same time, be appropriate food with which to honor his guests.

My second concern was that, having not knowingly eaten beef in India since the mid-1980s, I had little memory of its taste or its mouth-feel, nor had I felt its impact on my stomach or on my digestion. When people told me about the differences in flavor and texture between cow and buffalo meat; tried to explain their preference (or otherwise) for beef over chicken, goat or, fish; or described its succulent, sweet flavor and prized chewiness, I had to rely on their descriptions and my own imagination. I had no direct, material experience to help me contextualize their words. I could see and smell it, in all its forms, and I even felt it between my fingertips, but I never ingested it.

In the end, the pros and cons of my position as a vegetarian among the meat eaters, as it were, were fairly evenly balanced. Being a vegetarian was a useful provocation: it teased out other viewpoints as much as it suppressed them, in the same way that being outside a situation more generally can help an anthropologist to capture perspectives insiders cannot. It was also an occasional hindrance. The personal discomfort in navigating the tensions my position sometimes created was also productive, forcing me to reflect in ways that I might not otherwise have done. And my keen appreciation of other regional specialties that people fed me—gongura patchidi (an Andhra-specific green leaf chutney) especially—seemed to make up for any deficits in meat consumption.