New Vegetarianism: Food, Gender and Neo-Liberal Regimes in Bengali Middle-Class Families

Introduction In the 1990s, as the lifestyle of the Indian middle classes underwent dramatic change, an emerging consumerist orientation challenged many of the certainties embedded in everyday practices. Amongst the arenas where these changes were played out, food consumption and the availability of new foods across India’s metropolitan areas were particularly prominent, but have been notably absent in the analysis of these new lifestyles. That changing food habits signify wider social transformations in the aftermath of neo-liberal reform has been documented in some detail in the case of other regions, e.g. China, but in spite of a rich literature on traditional understandings of food and food practices in South Asia there has been little interest in the way such important everyday activities as eating at home or in public, snacking and feasting have been transformed in contemporary India. Furthermore, where consumption has been identified as a hallmark of new middle-class lifestyles it has been largely viewed in terms of the ‘public modernity’ paradigm. Thus the focus of social scientists has been on the public sphere, i.e. the emerging youth