Rat may be on menu in Indian canteens

Published on Tuesday 19 August 2008 22:15

ONE of India's poorest states is considering adding rat meat to the menus of government-run canteens, to provide cheap protein amid rising food prices.

"People in different parts of the world eat lizards and dogs. Why not rats?" Jeetan Ram Manjhi, the tribal welfare minister in Bihar state, said yesterday.

While the suggestion – there are no firm plans to start marketing rat meat just yet – may seem repulsive to many inside and outside India, eating rats is not unheard of in Bihar, most of whose 80 million people live mainly off the land as tenant farmers.

Among the poorest are a tribe known as Musahars, whose traditional place in India's caste system was to catch rats, which they would cook and eat along with the rice and wheat they recovered from rat holes.

That has changed in the past few decades, as many Musahars, under pressure from higher castes that consider rat-eating unclean, stopped dining on the creatures, although they are still paid to catch and kill them by farmers.

But Mr Manjhi, one of Bihar's two million Musahars, says rats are tasty, and hopes the practice could be revived and popularised by putting the rodents on the menu at canteens in government offices.

"We've been enjoying eating rats since our childhood," he said. "When vegetables get expensive, it's what we eat."

Vijay Prakash, the state welfare department secretary, said last week that popularising rat meat could also help Musahars, the vast majority of whom are bitterly poor and uneducated.

India's caste system divides people into hundreds of social tiers defined by ethnicity, class, history and livelihood. Discrimination along caste lines had been outlawed for decades but remains prevalent, especially in rural and poor areas.