Asian Cuisine’s Perplexing Partiality of Vegetarianism

The author, being a skinny man that he has been for the past God-knows-how-long, has never really been too careful on the foods he eats.  The logic is that, given the lack of body fat, high intakes of fattening foods should not be too problematic as long as certain precautions are taken.  And the author has been doing some of that, mostly avoiding fried snacks like potato chips and carbonated sodas, while keeping alcohol consumption to a social minimum.  Yes, there is lack of exercise, but he never thought of himself as terribly unhealthy.

Given his lack of physical stature and health concerns, it is all the more confusing that he was diagnosed with high cholesterol in his latest physical exam.  Told by the doctor to limit amount of meat and dairy intake, he set out to become a temporary vegan for a couple of days, seeking out all the best places to eat without having to touch a single piece of chicken, cheese, or egg.  Drastic as it seems, it is hoped that at the very least, he can find out a bit more about diversity in a cuisine dominated by meat (mostly chicken-based) dishes.

The task proved itself to be difficult from the very start.  The only immediate options seem to be the usual hole-in-the-walls selling Nasi Kandar (rice with mixed meats and vegetables that customer would select from buffet-like serving bowls), which tend to have at least a few all-vegetarian dishes.  But they are not deliberately vegetarian in that the same woks and oils are used for cooking both meat and vegetarian dishes, often inundating the servings of vegetable stir-fries with liquid forms of cholesterol-filled animal lard.

Sure, there are vegetarian restaurants, without a doubt, but their publicity has not been done well.  Many seem to lie in hard to find places, and in majority of cases, they are either associated with religious practices (Buddhism is the most common) or health consciousness that go against the general popularity of Malaysian foods.  How they transformed Malaysian cuisine into purely vegetarian forms seem to be accepted by only a small minority, with many people finding the alterations of the ingredients to be unacceptably detrimental to the original dishes.

Yet, the general public’s ambivalence toward vegetarian versions of their favorite dishes is not something limited to foods in Malaysia.  Across Asia, native cuisines have been slow to adapt vegetarianism, precisely because of local resistance toward it.  Aside from few pockets of religiously motivated locations (India is a great example), many locals are perplexed by the need to remove absolutely every piece of meat or dairy products from their dishes, thinking that such extremity takes too much away from the foods.

In Chinese cuisine, for instance, meats are usually used as garnishes for vegetable stir-fries, and meat soup bases are used for even what seems to be vegetarian stews.  For them, the use of such meats is as essential to the complete tastes of the dishes as use of condiments as salt and sugar.  In more meat-heavy cuisines like the Korean, removal of meats may simply cause a complete breakdown, removing so many potential dishes from what vegetarians can consume that what are left should not be deemed a “cuisine” at all.

As racist as this might sound, this may come from the fact that Asian cuisines have evolved to a greater complexity than, say, European cuisines, making changes to ingredients difficult without affecting a whole host of other culinary factors in the process.  The European liberalism to vegetarianism, then, is not simply a function of their greater health consciousness, but their foods’ capability to be transformed into purely vegetarian forms without greatly altering their tastes or cooking preparations. 

Indeed, European tendencies for grilling and tossing together ingredients in raw form are so much more dependent on tastes of the ingredients themselves that meat-based additions are not needed.  Curries and stir-fries, which depend on solid mixtures of different elements, do not work in the same way.  But given that Asians do have their own vegetarian cuisines, all hope is not lost.  The key for spread of vegetarianism in Asia might be spread of these now relatively marginal vegetarian dishes into the mainstream, rather than transforming current meat dishes into something vegetarian.