When it comes to solving the problem of getting enough to eat, India is basically a genius.

India has found that one jin of meat is equivalent to twenty jin of grain. If you don’t eat meat, those twenty jin of grain alone are enough to fill twenty people’s stomachs.

This is actually a bottom-layer logic that uses the lowest survival cost to domesticate human desires—it doesn’t teach you how to make the pie bigger, it teaches you how to fill the stomach.

So when you look at the street-side stalls on the Indian roads, that thick, sticky curry with a few thin flatbreads is enough to make an adult man eat with a face full of satisfaction. The spices turn cheap potatoes and beans into a “flavorful kind of full.” Every bite seems to tell you: you don’t need anything better—you just need it spicier.

But the truly brilliant part isn’t “saving food.” After this system runs smoothly, it turns into a closed loop by itself. If you grow up eating curry, then when you’re older your desire for meat will naturally decrease—you may even find meat smells bad, meat is too expensive, and meat isn’t clean. You don’t need force, you don’t need moral persuasion—the tip of your tongue will make the choice for you—and that choice happens to be the one with the lowest cost.

I remember a documentary that shot Mumbai’s slums. A mother used a handful of spices, half an onion, and a few green chilies to cook a big pot of curry beans for the whole family. The kids ate with sweat on their foreheads and laughed, saying, “This is the best thing.” In that moment, you can’t say they weren’t happy—but you also know in your heart that this “happiness” is because there’s no frame of comparison.

This might be just an exception, but it does reflect a real situation: when resources are extremely scarce, reducing desire and optimizing distribution are just as important. India isn’t incapable of producing meat; it’s just used a cultural contraption to package “not eating meat” as a “more sophisticated choice.”

It reminds me of something a friend once said: hunger is the best seasoning.

And curry is hunger’s fixed pairing.