Food Fables: How cow dung cooking shaped Indian cuisine

Time of India

22-04-2025

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David Chang's eyes lit up. The celebrity chef, founder of the Momofuku chain and Lucky Peach magazine, was in Mumbai to shoot a TV show, but seemed to be struggling to understand the food. Then he learned that dried cow dung was a traditional fuel in India and something clicked. 'Dishes like these come from being cooked on a low, slow fire,' he said looking at the dals and curries on the thali in front of him.The cooking isn't just slow, but gentler, resulting in dals, for example, breaking down, but not disintegrating completely, as they tend to do in pressure cookers. Food cooked in open pots on dung fires seems to taste different, but this is probably more due to their grainy, yet soft texture, which influences how we experience their flavour. It isn't necessarily better or worse, just different.Cow dung has become polarising. Some people extol it as a medicine, while others ridicule them for blind faith. Its value as a fertilizer, especially when fermented in formulations like panchagavya, is generally acknowledged, but most farmers will riot if denied cheap chemical fertilizers. A Delhi University principal recently plastered two classrooms with it claiming it was a study in traditional Indian knowledge of heat control. Furious students coated her own office with it, asking that she give them her air-conditioner instead.Such divisions have deep roots. Westerners were highly critical of Indian uses of cow dung as fuel or floor coating, both on grounds of sanitation and as a waste of much needed fertilizer. The Times of India, in August 1908, noted that 'whereas the market value of cow-dung cake as fuel is only 4½ annas per maund, this same material is worth 11½ annas per maund as manure,' yet the lack of cheap fuel alternatives meant that people kept burning cow-dung. American missionaries in letters home lamented the ignorance that kept Indians worshipping cows and burning their manure.But burning dung wasn't unknown in the West. In Ruth Goodman's The Domestic Revolution, about how coal stoves altered domestic lives, she notes that rural Britain long used dried dung as fuel, even down to having to deal with the same trade-off between fuel and manure. In 19th century America, 'the dried dung of wild buffalo herds, also known as 'buffalo chips'' was essential fuel for travellers heading West. Firewood was often hard to come-by, with forest access controlled by rulers. In many parts of the world coal mining for domestic use is a relatively recent development. Dung was usually a useful, renewable choice.As the supply of fuels like coal or kerosene grew, their promoters had obvious reasons for denigrating dung. In August 1907 ToI article noted that dung fires 'continue to smoulder after a meal is cooked and so go to waste. The consumption of kerosene, however, can be stopped as soon as the operation of cooking is at an end.' But Goodman notes that the nature of dung also started changing. Cows were usually fed straw and grass, while nutrient rich grains like oats went to horses, who were felt to need more energy as a means of transportation.But as automobiles started replacing horses, their fodder became available to livestock farmers, who were also under pressure to produce more milk and meat. Goodman notes that this changed the digestive system of cattle: 'They live their lives with something akin to permanent diarrhoea.' This liquid dung is less suitable for burning, a process that can be seen in India too, even with stray cattle whose wild foraging is now usually mixed with eating wet garbage. People who collect and dry dung from roads must now add more dry matter, like rice straw or dried leaves. For reasons like this we are never likely to return to widespread use of dung for cooking, but its historical importance in shaping Indian cuisines is beyond controversy.