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At a time when the Indian state has been clamping down on those who dissent from its stance on cattle and when self-appointed vigilantes have deployed increasing violence against those who trade in or consume beef, acknowledging my friends and interlocutors in India who have made this book possible is something of a double-edged sword. I thus use pseudonyms, as I do throughout the book, or initials, to protect those mentioned here, but I hope that they, at least, will know who they are.

To the man I have called Das, my long-term research associate, I owe a great deal. He was there throughout my last two periods of fieldwork, discussing the findings as we went along and directly collecting data in the form of food diaries and village surveys, as well as helping to organize my itinerary. As a lifelong vegetarian, he also went beyond the call of duty to accompany me to interview cattle traders, brokers, butchers, and beef sellers as they went about their everyday business. His unrelenting zest for finding out new things about the society in which he lives and his willingness to talk with anyone, quite aside from his fluency in several Indian languages, were invaluable qualities in sustaining my own enthusiasm throughout sometimes challenging fieldwork. He helped prompt me to ask the questions that needed to be asked. In common with other friends in Anandapuram and Hyderabad, he has also been a willing correspondent in the months following the fieldwork and as I wrote this book, answering emailed queries on everything from the average weight of local cows to the caste backgrounds of brokers, revisiting some of the butchers we worked with several times to double-check on the finer points of slaughter techniques.

Other friends have been similarly helpful in providing instant responses on WhatsApp: recipes, photos of fuel cakes fashioned out of cow dung, and explanations of common idioms have all been forthcoming just when I needed them, both extending the fieldwork beyond my presence in the field and enabling feedback on my analysis in ways that were simply not possible even ten or fifteen years ago.

To the late Sambrajamma (my first cook in Anandapuram), to F, to K, and to all the others who fed me and shared their recipes, their culinary expertise, and their thoughts on food over the years I am also indebted, as I am to the butchers and meat sellers of Bhavanipur and of the markets and side streets of Hyderabad, as well as to all those who helped and befriended me in Anandapuram. Many of them gave freely of their time to put on record stories that they felt were not currently being told. Several also were willing to take me to the places where cattle were slaughtered and sold. Others kept food diaries, or spent hours talking to me in forensic detail about their shopping, cooking, and eating habits.

My old friend EC warrants special thanks, not only for many hours of fruitful, detailed discussions about my material but especially for providing a constant source of links to news reports on all matters bovine and for serving as a conduit through which information and the opinions of others have also been channeled. Her feedback on a draft of my manuscript was invaluable.

Institutionally, in the UK, I am grateful especially to the British Academy, whose small grant (SG161306) covered the airfares and fieldwork expenses for my two most recent visits to India, as well as funding a trip to the Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 2017 to share (and shape) first thoughts on my data. Thanks also to Ronnie Johnson and June Costard in the research office at Brunel University London for administering the grant and for guiding me so patiently through bureaucratic hoops that were otherwise difficult to navigate. I am grateful to Brunel more generally for giving me the two terms of research leave I needed to write this book.

At the 2017 Madison conference, just months after completing fieldwork in India, I was fortunate enough to be part of a one-day symposium organized by Cassie Adcock and Radhika Govindrajan, titled “Cow, Buffalo, Bullock: Bovine Politics in South Asia.” I benefited a great deal from questions, feedback, and related papers from the organizers and my fellow contributors, Sahana Ghosh, Kathryn C. Hardy, Nayanika Mathur, Barbara Ramusack, and SherAli Tareen. Naisargi Dave and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, our discussants, and others who participated in the preconference also offered invaluable insights. It was while I was at Madison that I had the initial meetings with Lorri Hagman, executive editor at the University of Washington Press, that led to this book being published. I thank her and her colleagues for their enthusiasm, good humor, and straightforward guidance throughout.

Back in the UK, my most consistent source of support has been through Nkumi, a small, close-knit writing group of anthropologists and sociologists working on food that meets monthly at SOAS in London. Over the past year or so, in addition to being exposed in that forum to some of the most thought-provoking new academic writing on food that I could ever have hoped for, I have also had the opportunity to present several draft chapters of this book. A big thank-you to Nora Faltmann, Katharina Graf, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Hull, Jakob Klein, Anne Murcott, Johan Pottier, and Sami Zubaida for their detailed scrutiny and always constructive comments and criticism on early renderings of parts of this book, as well as for sharing their own work. I owe particular thanks to Anne Murcott for generously providing a careful reading of my initial proposals for the book and for being such a close correspondent and source of support throughout the process of writing and rewriting it; and also to Harry West, not only for establishing the Nkumi group in the first place and later inviting me to join it but also for giving valuable feedback and encouragement in response to first drafts of my funding proposals for the field research on which this book draws. It would be hard to overstate the importance of this support network in bringing this project to completion; it would otherwise have been a much slower and lonelier process.

Useful feedback has also been forthcoming at the various other seminars and workshops at which I presented aspects of the material over the last two or three years, and I am grateful for all the invitations to give papers, which I was happy to accept. These include departmental seminars at the Universities of Manchester, East Anglia, and Roehampton; at the Anthropology in London Day at University College, London, in 2016; and, over 2018, at seminars at SOAS and Brunel. At SOAS, particular thanks go to Paul Basu—who chaired the seminar—and to Richard Fardon, Fabio Gygi, Marloes Janson, Kevin Latham, David Mosse, Edward Simpson, and others for their questions and comments. At Brunel, I am grateful to Isak Niehaus, who organized the seminar at which I presented a chapter, and to probing questions from Andrew Beatty, Liana Chua, Eric Hirsch, and Will Rollason. Peggy Froerer and Liana Chua also warrant additional mention for their help in peer-reviewing the British Academy application that ultimately made this project possible.

Elements of the research have fed into other publications along the way, reflections on which have also informed the current book. It was working on a paper for a special issue of the journal South Asia—coedited by Caroline and Filippo Osella (2008b)—that first got me thinking about meat eating in India; working with Jakob Klein on Consumer and Consumed, an edited special issue of the journal Ethnos (Staples and Klein 2017a)—which in turn drew on a panel we coconvened at the 2011 conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) in the UK—drew me in even further. Jakob also invited me to write a chapter on food and caste in India for the handbook he edited with James Watson (Klein and Watson 2016), and I am deeply appreciative of his always thoughtful comments and suggestions both as an editor and as a coauthor. Kiranmayi Bhushi, with her specialist, interdisciplinary knowledge of food in South Asia, was likewise a valuable interlocutor as I further traced attitudes toward beef eating in South India for an essay in her recently published anthology (Bhushi 2018). Although none of the chapters in this book directly replicate this previous work, they draw and expand on it extensively.

In the writing of this book, I have also leaned on several South Asianist colleagues for their own fieldwork insights and for pointers toward what to read. Thank you, Henrike Donner, Michele Friedner, and Atreyee Sen in particular, and thanks also to scholars I have not yet met, such as Kalyan Das, Estelle Fourat, Suraj Jacob, Jacob Lahne, Balmurli Natrajan, and Christy Spackman, all of whom corresponded with me or shared relevant articles at just the right moments along the way.

I am indebted to the two anonymous readers for their feedback on an earlier draft of this book. I warmed to them not only because of their kind words and their enthusiasm for the project but also because of their thoroughness, fine attention to detail, and thoughtful suggestions. Remaining flaws are, of course, my own, but this certainly became a better book from responding to their comprehensive feedback.

Finally, thanks to my family, Becky, Theo, and Felix, for being there throughout. Stanley has also been a willing walking and running companion through the whole process: the hours of thinking time I spent with him away from my desk each day were often the most productive ones.