Long before chilly beef there was beef fry . No fancy slices stir fried in soya sauce and tossed in ajinomoto, just Kerala jerky , dark and brooding, promising to make men of cowboys. And no less tasty in the bargain.If you were Hindu and lucky , there was neighbouring Jose's house to walk into on Easter or on the feast day of St George's Forane Church to gorge on appam and beef roast. You tucked into so much of the choice veal swimming in thick g ravy that ammachi, the granny who never called beef by any other name, ambled over and exclaimed: “Carry on son, but don't forget the pudding is also waiting“.Beef has long been the king of the table in Kerala, and for the simple reason that it is appetizing. It accounts for more than 40% of all meat consumed in the state. Around 80% of the people here regularly eat beef, not just in Christian and Muslim homes, and not just the rich either. There are no precise figures, but there is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that more Hindus could be eating it re gularly than Christians and Muslims put together.Of course, cultural osmosis has had a major role to play in this. Muslims, Christians and Hindus in Kerala have coexisted fraternally. The miseries that Tipu's hordes inflicted or the few mud forts that Vasco da Gama's cannons demolished have been the extent of the civilizational conflict here. Cuisines in Kerala have migrated from one kitchen to another, back and forth. Nobody here had any Holy Grail to pursue and the cow, before manufactured identities were forced on Malayalis, was not attributed anything beyond what a man could stomach. Yet, as George Orwell reminds us, “Some animals are more equal than others“. Hindus in the state may not venerate the cow as much as they do in other parts of our country, but it has always been seen as a benign creature, companionable, even sentient. Beef wasn't exactly forbidden fruit in Kerala but, among Hindus, it was certainly a guilty pleasure. If taste accounted for beef 's popularity, it was caste taboos that provided the transgressive element, making it all the more appetizing.These days, beef in Kerala comes attractively packaged and of exotic provenance -from Texas, Australia, and even Argentina. Steaks and burgers complete the process of distancing the consumer from the farm or factory, making any residual guilt or caste taboo redundant.However, such wilful forgetting or distancing, Jonathan Safran Foer argues in his thought-provoking book Eating Animals, is dangerous because our foods are intimately connected to our stories, ones linked to our survival as individuals and as communities. These stories are what prevent most humans from, say , consuming dogs or why many others consider pork or beef taboo. To make too much of these stories, as the Maharashtra ban on the sale, consumption or possession of beef does, would, of course, be atavistic, but to totally ignore them would instead be, Foer contends, suicidal to our wellbeing as humans.Remember that when you tuck into Kerala style beef fry next time -the real thing, not the buff but the cow. It will make it all the more tastier. For, as at least one religion assures us, any food -even the holy cow -when eaten lovingly becomes the flesh and blood of god.Transubstantiated. Amen.