The earliest Indians, the Harappans, probably ate mainly wheat and rice and lentils（扁豆） , and occasionally（偶尔，间或） cows, pigs, sheep, and goats, and chicken. Rice and chicken seem to have come from Thailand, and wheat and sheep from West Asia. Some of the wheat was made into stews（炖汤，杂烩） or soups, and some into flat breads called chapatis（印度薄饼） . The arrival of the Aryans（雅利安人） does not seem to have changed Indian eating habits.

But by around 300 BC, under the Mauryans, a lot of Hindus felt that animal sacrifices added to your karma（因果报应） and kept you from getting free of the wheel of reincarnation（再生，化身） . Animal sacrifices became less popular, and although people didn’t give up eating meat entirely, they ate much less of it. And a lot of people became vegetarians（素食主义者） .

In the Gupta period, around 650 AD, Hindus began to worship a Mother Goddess. Cows were sacred to her, and so Hindus stopped eating beef.

And then around 1100 AD, with the Islamic conquests in northern India, most people in India stopped eating pork as well, because it is forbidden by the Koran（古兰经，可兰经） .

People could still eat sheep or goats or chicken, but most of the people in India became vegetarians, and only ate meat very rarely or not at all.

The vegetarian food that Indians ate was mainly wheat flatbreads or a kind of flatbread made out of chickpeas（鹰嘴豆） , with a spicy（辛辣的，香的） vegetarian sauce, and yogurt（酸奶酪，酸乳） . or people ate rice, with yogurt and vegetables. A lot of spicy peppers grew in India.