Last weekend, I attended a vegan conference. It was interesting to hear a doctor speak on how a vegan diet has been proven (through research) to positively impact diabetes. There was a discussion on how being vegan didn’t necessarily mean you were healthy — you could be eating junk food and still be kind to animals (though not your body). A participant drew attention to the fact that vegan cheese (made from cashew or coconut oil) had, in fact, a higher fat content than cheese made from dairy. Through it all, we sipped (in my case glugged) dairy-free coffee.

Then I met an American who asked me the inevitable so-are-you-vegan question. I said I wasn’t. “Give me an hour, and I’ll convert you,” he said. I said I wasn’t looking to be converted, but he wasn’t listening. “The problem with India, is all this ghee,” he went on.

I tried to tell him that I agreed that we weren’t milking our cows in the most humane way — that we shouldn’t be injecting hormones, and we should eat meat consciously, the way we did just a generation ago. But also that India didn’t invent the hormone-injecting practice, that we didn’t feed them flesh-and-bone meal, we didn’t have animal farms in the way the West did, until a generation ago. Even today, it’s rare for people to eat a pound of beef (or any meat) at one sitting. The proliferation of Western fast-food chains in our country that render meat (and other ingredients) useless to our bodies is a real problem.

What is it that gives people the right to walk into someone else’s country and tell them what to eat? To criticise what they know so little about? To trample upon many centuries of food habits, culture, medicine (Ayurveda uses ghee in some medication)? But it’s worse: it’s a case of the West making mistakes and then pointing fingers at the East, much like they do with pollution. They’ve goofed up with food, and are now pretending they’re our saviours, telling us to eat more veg. India is one of the lowest consumers of meat; America, the largest.

Like many -isms, veganism is extreme. But if you can have a discussion with me, sure, I’ll come to the table, and maybe even subscribe to your thoughts and beliefs. I may, for instance, cut down my meat intake. But if you’re going to lay a ‘karmic load’ judgement on me, no thank you. Since I’m at the table though, could you pass me the chicken curry, please.