Vegetarians in the Tropics just have more fun.

When you tell someone that part of your New Year’s resolution is to eat cleaner or to go vegetarian, everyone assumes that you’re going to be eating caesar salads, ‘tofurky’, fruit salads, trail mixes, more salads, salads, salads, salads!

“That’s depressing!” “I could never give up meat!” “You’re not gonna last long” 

I’m not a vegetarian, but I did not realise it until recently that I actually eat a lot of vegetarian dishes in my daily life living in Malaysia. 

Despite the plethora of vegetarian or vegan-friendly recipes from the West, with a large percentage of vegetarians in Finland, Sweden, Australia, Mexico and Brazil; did you know that India has the largest percentage of vegetarians in the world, with 34% of Indians identifying as vegetarians, and that they have the lowest meat consumption in the world? When we look East or to the South, 79% of Buddhist Sinhalese and 21% of Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka take it a step further by going vegan. 13% of the population in Taiwan and 14% of Chinese population identify as vegetarian in 2022 . The higher the population of vegetarians, just means that accessibility of vegetarian or vegan food is easy and normalised, likely also cheaper. Going vegetarian is relatively expensive, ‘clean eating’ is a privilege to many, with cheaper foods being worth more on a per calorie basis. It’s just a better bang for your buck to eat meat or buy takeout. However, recipes from Indian, Sri Lankan, Chinese, and Taiwanese cuisine makes being a vegetarian cheaper, and easier (and dare I say, more fun) without feeling hungry or dissatisfied post-meal.

You might not realise this, but there might be a huge chance you’ve been eating like a vegetarian this whole time. 

Chinese Cuisine

I grew up with Chinese cuisine all my life, being cooked at home and even having it in restaurants, and one thing you will notice when dining at a Chinese food place, whether high-end or run-of-the-mill aunty and uncle restaurants, we always have a vegetable dish present with every meal. While ordering, if you forget to order a vegetable dish, the waiter would ask “What about greens?” as if a meal would not be complete without it. The most common and generic one is a dish made with tons of garlic, any leafy greens cooked with some oil.

Now, this is something many Chinese vegetarians would be familiar with: Fatt Putt. A dish made with yams and cashew nuts, a few selected vegetables like carrots and snow peas, mushrooms, and sometimes, mock meat (link to our other article strictly about chinese mock meat).

Instead of baked or stir fry tofu, try a Chinese steamed tofu with soy garlic sauce or a vegetarian mapo tofu recipe, all ready in 15 minutes! All of it goes lovely with fresh white rice.

As a Chinese family, we would regularly order this dish at restaurants or during Chinese New Year. I hadn’t realised until recently how easy it is to make it vegetarian friendly; just don’t add the chicken!

Have you ever been to China or any asian food store that sells snacks from China? Their vegan or vegetarian snacks are insanely next level, with a soy-based protein snack or the konjac strips, flavoured with classic Sichuan spicy mala-tang spices, all packaged individually, easy to carry and eat on-the-go or when you want to add something to your bowl of rice.

South Indian Cuisine

The classic Southern Indian dishes that are served on a banana leaf in restaurants or during special occasions, it’s all vegetarian, and it’s delicious. Appalam (fried ground black gram flour), achar, mor milagai, vegetable sambar, cucumber raita, and more. The flavours are so complex yet its preparation so simple, and you get to have a meal with 5 or more side dishes to eat with rice. Our favourite part? The palate cleanser, rasam; a warm, spicy, sour, and spice-filled soup that is served in restaurants in a small stainless steel shot-glass. This goes to show that a whole meal can be satisfying and vegetarian, without even using the word ‘vegetarian’.

For those who enjoy adding mock-meats or plant-based meat alternatives to your meals, jungle jack is a great mock-meat option if you want something that isn’t made of soybeans or seitan, a safe option for vegetarians or vegans and those with a soybean allergy.

Going back to the first point we made, while all of us grew up differently, chances are if you think of the word ‘vegetarian’, or search it up on Google, you’d imagine a bowl of raw greens, carrots, cabbage, avocado, and tomatoes with some balsamic vinegar drizzled on top. We’d hope to change that and how people view vegetarianism. It’s not our fault, it just so happens that when we search up vegan or vegetarian recipes and ingredients online, we’re often met with the same few Western-centric dishes and articles.