Food in India has long been understood as structured through an opposition between the vegetarian and the non-vegetarian, just as commensality or its refusal has also long been studied as a central plank towards understanding caste hierarchies.

This special issue brings together contemporary ethnography which reexamines and interrogates the usefulness of these classic terms of analysis, while also bringing in new questions, such as what happens when a low-ranking tribal community turn vegetarian, or how middle-class urban women deal with hospitality in mixed community settings, or why some vegetarian men hold chicken and whisky parties. The collection also engages with wider contemporary theories of food and its links to memory, politics and ethnicity, both within the papers themselves and in the form of an ‘Introduction’ and an ‘Afterword’ which discuss the contributions in the context of the broader ‘food studies’ literature.