Meat and Potatoes

Meat and Potatoes

Sunday Times of London Style Magazine food critic AA Gill, a Scotsman with a Sikh name that he does not explain: perhaps it was originally McGill, but he dropped the Mc because of its less than haute cuisine association with the branded hamburgers. McBurgers, that have been sold so plentifully, that if they were laid end-to-end, they would go to the moon and back several times over.

Mr. Gill, who might be a Sikh after all, also has initials in place of his first names, and wrote, somewhat enigmatically, in a recent restaurant review, that “meat is all eugenics and fascism”.

AA Gill is a mysterious sort, often favours dark glasses and eschews alcohol, despite being a food critic. He goes on the strength of his intelligence, taste, language and stylistic skills, even if he doesn’t ever say so himself. All this, without once imbibing the wine.

As for Gill’s typically elliptic comment: did he mean by the former moniker, the genetic engineering and up-breeding involved to produce superior meat? And the fascism is presumably the uncompromising attitude necessary to make it happen.

This applies to beef and pork, because they are the serious meats of choice in the Western world. Fowl, Turkey, Duck, however formidable, are also-rans, decided poor cousins, to whom the same principle may well apply, but without the same degree of exactitude and accountability.

Though it is at once true, that huge, essentially tasteless in themselves turkeys, like triple distilled Vodka, have been known to feed mini-van fulls, of family and friends, while still yielding left-overs.

This even as one turkey is pardoned every year. A reprieve granted by no less that the President of the US for Thanksgiving, that peculiarly Puritanical Pilgrim Fathers celebration at the heart of American prudery.

Besides, one wouldn’t know how to classify snake-meat, not to mention, kangaroo, horse, seal, elk, moose.

Where that leaves the eponymous potatoes that proverbially accompany the meat, is anybody’s guess. And this in all meat-eating countries, including Ireland, though there, they allegedly prefer to live and die by the potato.

My personal guess would liken them, the humble potatoes, to the excellent back-up singers without whom no singing stars of heft would properly shine. However, ask them, and the back-up singers, like stage-lights, will profess contentment with their good jobs to do; no more, no less.

Another report, not written by Mr. Gill at all, on European, U.S., South-American, Australian, and Japanese milk, certainly; and others who follow their Dairy-farming practices, indicates that it contains all manner of additives fed to the cows that gave it up. And that drinking quantities of milk production enhancing boosters meant for the cow, but inescapable if one imbibes its milk, may not be all that good for humans.

European and American dairy-produced milk, has large draughts of cow hormone boosters, and cow vitamins and cow tranquilisers too. But clearly, what may be divine for the bovine is not so for old “two legs”. Also, milk from the free-on-the-range variety, spending their days in bucolic grazing, like the Swiss Chocolate mothers, perhaps don’t poison as they sweeten.

Fortunately, milk and meat are two different things. Though the cow hopped-up on boosters is also capable, no doubt, of contributing wonderful tenderloin. So delicious as it may be, to drink from, taste, eat; is eugenics, let alone fascism, working out to be a hero or a villain?

And so, at last, to the question, drawing upon the ready analogy, of whether India has, you know, meat; or is merely aggregated from the potato patch, bless its soul.

The moot point in this: it all begins with land. There’s land for grass and land for things in concrete and other bits for the macadam and rail. But first, there is indeed the land. Now in India, land is the best way to get-rich-quick if one has the power to change its use parameters- the hallowed Governmental stroke-of-the-pen CLU (change in land use), a kind of open-sesame planning permission, transforms the potato patch into very powerful, and enriching meat instantly.

The farmer/land-owner sells, or is compelled to sell via acquisition notices from the Government, using an 1894 law that permits daylight robbery, because the unilaterally set acquisition rates have no bearing on prevailing market prices at all.

But it isn’t as if the Government is not aware of the profit potential of the agricultural land thus acquired. But in its original “use” state, one can only grow food or graze livestock on it. But after the Government turns the self-same land, notwithstanding whether it is arable or waste-land, into “commercial” or “residential” or “institutional”, hey presto, by just changing its classification, it turns into a gold mine. And there are many takers, willing to pay many multiples of what the Government paid the farmer to usurp his land just a few pen strokes ago.

This is what is at the heart of the meat and potatoes conundrum, because quite apart from normal co-existence, in this context, said meat and said potatoes are actually interchangeable, and never mind the incipient eugenics or fascism involved!

This inherent unfairness to the original land-owner goes a long way to explain the political fortune boosting propensities of both Singur and Parsa-Bhataul.

And for once, Mr. Rahul Gandhi has latched onto a genuinely worthwhile cause. His suggestion that there should be two land acquisition laws, one applicable for roads, bridges, railway lines etc. and another for SEZs, institutional, residential/commercial development etc. has substantial merit.

Government might be justified in commandeering land cheaply if it truly puts it to a “public purpose” like said road, port, rail etc., whereas all the other uses, just various forms of property development, benefit limited numbers of people at best, including the pen-wielders involved in conjuring up that all important CLU, but to the decidedly unfair exclusion of the original land-owners.

A colonial administration, which is what obtained in 1894, was of course not interested in serving any interests other than its own, but, as in much else that involves the independent Government of India to date, it has seen little reason to change its ways, or its laws, to actually serve the people it, in effect, lives off.

Still, at present, new land acquisition laws may indeed come to be passed in parliament and not just the state assemblies, because they are of interest to Mr. Gandhi and ergo, to a Central Government. A Central Government moreover run by a Party intent on embarrassing the state government of Uttar Pradesh in the lead up to the forthcoming assembly elections there in 2012.

(1,099 words)


10th July 2011
Gautam Mukherjee