Cow is meat, not mother. For many Malayalis , this is the delicious, deep-fried truth. We swear by it as we wrap a piece of warm, flaky parotta around dark spicy beef ularthiyathu that gets coated in black pepper, whispers of curry leaves and rubs against white cubes of coconut.And we know something else that seems to have escaped the collective intellectual might of the north Indian: beef comes from slaughtering cows, it doesn’t bloom in gulmohar trees, it doesn’t get mysteriously covered in plastic and apparition in supermarket freezers, it is not a rare variant of paneer that appears as tenderloin steak in restaurants. So Malayalis go to the nearby meat shop and buy a kilo of beef that costs Rs 300. The cow may be holy but its meat ain’t tender.So cut the beef into small cubes and marinate it in a tease of turmeric, a dash of vinegar, a knob of ginger, some cloves of garlic, five split green chillies, a cloud of black pepper, salt — and pressure cook it. The Environment Ministry’s May 23 notification restricted the sale of cattle for slaughter in animal market and extended the definition of the “animal market” to such an extent — “any other premises or place to which animals are brought from other places and exposed for sale or auction” — that selling cattle for slaughter would become a near-impossibility.On the first day of Ramzan in Kerala , both the ruling Left parties and the Opposition Congress held beef festivals. What we consider as commonplace as the poorihalwa cooked on Delhi’s streets suddenly became the most subversive of all Indian festivals. For Malayalis, it was mass celebration and organic protest, an assertion of their secular food habits against a beefmukt, Brahmanic diet. It was Beef’s Own Country resisting the diktat of cow belt. Malayalis flooded Facebook with photos of their eating beef at restaurants, cooking beef at home and even passionate declarations by those who switched to eating beef that very day.It was just 100 years ago, on May 29, 1917, that the first inter-caste feast was organised in Kerala. The revolutionary act saw Dalits having lunch with backward caste Ezhavas — rice and a mezhukkupuratti (sauté) of jackfruit seeds and chickpeas. It was just a century ago that Malayalis began to snatch the freedom to eat what they want, with whom they want, and where. The beef fest wasn’t anywhere as radical as that frugal lunch, but both made eating an intensely political act.That was lost on North Indians. Conservatives screamed that Hindus should stop going to Kerala and kill the tourism industry. They taunted us: do you have pork festivals? How would they know that in the socially osmotic membrane of Kerala, one of the few rules my Hindu family lives by is that there has to be pork on Easter just as a goat used to be slaughtered in our backyard on Christmas just as my grandfather fasted on Lent and Ramzan? In the cosmopolitan crucible of that land, food is a common heritage, shared joy. Now, take the beef out of that pressure cooker and fry it in a cheenachatti, the iron wok handed down by old Chinese travellers. Food, after all, is a cauldron of influences. Sauté beef with thinly sliced shallots until you don’t know where the onion ends and the meat begins, until it takes on the flavours of the spices you sprinkle, until it is as dark and delicious as sin.An overzealous Youth Congress worker in Kerala slaughtered a calf in the open — “no, no, not a young cow, it was a young ox,” flustered explanations followed to calm down an apoplectic North India. To no avail. Protesters came out on the streets of Delhi against a beef festival in faraway Kerala. They haven’t had a word to say against the assault on an IIT-Madras student for eating beef. They haven’t squeaked against the lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq and Pehlu Khan . They haven’t shouted slogans for the Dalits who were beaten up in Una. North India shrank into the figure of a gaurakshak who puts an animal’s life above a human being’s.Cattle should not be slaughtered publicly, Malayalis acquiesced, but they do have to be slaughtered for beef ularthiyathu, beef fry, beef biryani, kappa and beef. Nothing gets north India’s goat like the beef. In the great Venn diagram of Hindus, the north Indian liberal and the north Indian conservative overlap in their anxiety about beef. Beef festival was difficult even for the liberals to stomach, as they mumbled about animal rights and ethical eating. They said beef fest is mindlessly counter-productive. This war can’t be fought with beef, they warned, you will end up riling the heartland. They even said eating red meat is no longer fashionable in the modern world.Hopefully, freedom still is. They don’t get the incredible ordinariness and extraordinariness of that meat in Kerala. They don’t sense that what they find egregious is a way of life for us. Just as we respect your veneration of cattle, you need to respect our food habits too. When Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi decried the slaughter as “barbaric”, without saying anything about the notification, it took the wind out of the sails of the party in Kerala. He failed to alter the discourse by standing up for the freedom to eat as well as the right to livelihood of millions dependent on meat processing and leather industries.The liberal Hindu of north India has a question to answer: when was the last time you came out on the streets to defend the freedom of minorities? How often have you looked away from your sattvik thali and stepped out of your ancient prejudices to protect someone else’s rights? An analysis of the data of the National Sample Survey Organisation by The Hindu and India Datalabs brings out some interesting figures: the number of Indians eating beef and buffalo meat went up from 7.51 crore in 1999-2000 to 8.35 crore in 2011-12. The percentage may be small but the numbers are substantial. The consumption of beef/buffalo meat grew by 14% in urban and 35% in rural India between 2004-05 and 2011-12, according to IndiaSpend. Don’t their dietary preferences matter?Cow gives us so much, argue the gaubhakts. So does the coconut tree. But you don’t find Malayalis prostrating before it, except when they have had a little too much of the evening tipple. Now serve the beef and wrap a fragment of parotta around it. Some of us call it a slice of heaven.