The Caste on Their Plate

Written By: Dr. Sabreen Asari

About Author

Public health doctor, healthcare entrepreneur, and primary care physician with the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation. Passionate about health equity, community medicine, and systems innovation. Writing to amplify the human stories behind healthcare.

A powerful firsthand account by a rural doctor exposing how caste-based discrimination shapes food access, child malnutrition, and public health in India. A call for food justice beyond charity.”

“Milk is not for our children,” Kalawati told us during our rural posting in the tribal villages of Nandurbar. “We only get meat when someone’s cow dies.” She said it like a fact. Not with anger, just defeat. She wasn’t asking for sympathy. She was simply describing how things are and have always been for her family.

I’ve heard many things as a doctor: clinical complaints, desperate questions, whispered fears. But that line about milk or its absence stayed with me. Behind it is a story of generations being fed not just less, but worse. Not just hunger, but humiliation. A quiet, enduring violence that shaped their bodies, their health, and their futures. I used to think food was a basic need, a right. Then I started working in rural clinics and community health centres and I began to see what caste does to food. Dalits, pushed to the margins of society, were also pushed to the margins of the kitchen. For centuries, they weren’t allowed into markets. They couldn’t share wells or buy from the same vendors. They had no land to grow their own food. Whatever was left literally that’s what they survived on. This wasn’t just poverty. It was structural exclusion. Food apartheid. And over time, this history of being denied good food turned into a full-blown public health crisis.

In the clinic, I saw what textbooks call chronic undernutrition. But what I was really seeing were bodies shaped by discrimination: Stunted children who couldn’t concentrate in school. Teenage girls with severe anaemia, so tired they could barely walk. Pregnant women with dangerously low haemoglobin levels. Elderly men with bowed legs and brittle bones.Skin dull. Eyes sunken. Energy gone. They didn’t lack willpower. They lacked vitamins. Protein. Clean water. Time to rest. Land to grow. A chance. And they carried it all in silence. What caste didn’t take away directly, it withheld slowly one skipped meal, one unequal bite at a time.

I think of Dr. Ambedkar, who wrote in Waiting for a Visa about being denied food and water on a journey because of his caste. As a child, he and his siblings went entire days without eating because no one would serve them. That experience shaped him. And in some ways, it still shapes millions like him. And I think of Kalawati, whose three children were all undernourished when I met her. She hadn’t cooked in two days. Her youngest had marasmus. There was no milk, no gas, no land. Just a few onions and a heap of silence.

As a doctor, I can treat iron deficiency with tablets. I can counsel mothers about breastfeeding. But I can’t erase hunger from history. I can’t write a prescription for dignity. What we really need is food justice. Not charity justice. That means making sure policies reach the people most excluded. It means giving land back. It means including Dalit voices in public health planning. It means making sure no child ever believes that milk isn’t meant for them.

We often talk about malnutrition in India as a technical problem—grams of protein, calories, iron intake. But sometimes, it’s not just about what’s on the plate. It’s about who was never allowed at the table.