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Before discussing the food habits of the ancient Tamils it may be pointed out that Indians, throughout the ages, have been mainly vegetarians. Not that they did not love the taste of meat; on the contrary when they got it they ate it with great delight. Nor did they throw to the dogs the game they hunted, without consuming it themselves. But Indians never made the flesh of animals their staple food like the people of Western Europe. The latter living in countries where cereals cannot be produced in abundance, have been forced by their environment to adopt meat as their chief article of food and add to their dietary a minimum quantity of vegetable substance, because meat by itself is not a perfect food and because they cannot resist nature's urge to consume vegetable products charged with the chlorides, and iodides, the sulphates and phosphates and other salts necessary for the healthy life of a body. To use Indian phraseology, meat is their food and vegetable their curry; that is they eat meat to sustain their bodies and cereals and other vegetarian food to add relish to their meat. In India the position is reversed. Rice, wheat, the millets and the pulses are our food, and meat (and green-vegetables) our curry; that is we eat rice or wheat or millet and the seeds of legumes to rebuilidrebuild [sic] tissue lost by combustion, and meat and green vegetables turned into curry to add relish to the cereals which are mostly insipid in themselves and unfitted to stimulate to activity the glands which secrete saliva and other juices necessary for dissolving and digesting starches and proteidsproteins [sic]. In other words meat is food to Europeans and but curry to Indians. In this connection I may point out that curry, kari, is the name in Tamil not only of curried meat or vegetable and of sauce in general, but also