I was talking to some Indians about their regional differences in cuisine, and expressed some interest in south indian food since I hadn’t eaten it. They replied that I probably wouldn’t like it since “south indian” food by its nature is vegetarian, even though many south indians themselves are not. I tried looking up an explanation for why that would be and found a pakistani forum where it was claimed that 84 percent of south indian households are non-vegetarian, whereas as the lowest rates of non-vegetarianism are in the north at 53 per cent (east was 94 and west was 58, with an overall percentage of nearly 71). So if south indians are unusually likely to NOT be vegetarians, it makes it very curious that their archetypical cuisine is vegetarian. Indian restaurants I’ve seen here also seem to reverse the reported representation of fish vs mutton vs chicken, although it could be that I’ve just ignored the seafood since I’m into turf than surf.
UPDATE: Agnostic sometimes talks about vegetarians really being unhealthy sugar-stuffers, and so I figured I’d check out the GSS to see the correlation between NOMEAT and INTRWGHT. Unfortunately, those are for disjoint sets of years. I then decided to try googling, and the first few results were complaints on some forum about an inability to find data! Fortunately I found this.
November 24, 2011 at 1:00 pm
Bro, this is the biggest misconception ever. South-Indian food is NOT vegetarian and has in fact more non-vegetarian options than North India. For example, chicken and mutton are the main available meat options in North, whereas if you come down to Kerala down South, you can enjoy variety of options like Beef( yes, we Mallus are hardcore beef-eaters :P), Pork, Rabbit,Duck, Crab, unlimited variety of sea-food and many more.
Please see this Discovery channel video to know more about Kerala cuisine:
November 27, 2011 at 2:58 pm
If you know some south indian places in Chicago that serve meat, give me some recommendations!