Beyond Bounds Blog

I wrote about “The China Study” in a previous post and how that and my experience in China pushed me to make the decision to go Vegan.  This does not mean that eating vegan in China is easier.  Chinese people DO eat LESS meat, but I would argue that there are fewer choices of NO meat than in the USA.  Coming to China CAN result in healthier eating, but eating at the healthiest level is not as easy as in other places in the world.

Many people out there think that living in China makes going vegan super easy and almost “natural.”  Here are some things that people should know about China:

1. Meat is considered a blessing.  Fish is considered lucky.

2. All holiday meals include almost exclusively meat: I barely ate at my company’s New Year’s dinner because they only ordered one plate with vegetables and 15 plates of meat.

3. Nearly every dish contains meat in some form, whether it is ground, sliced, or simply used as a base.  There are very few fully vegetarian dishes.

4. Eating vegetarian is known only as a moral thing of monks and for women on a diet.  It is considered as not necessary for health, and not eating meat means that you are purposefully not satisfying your body’s needs.

5. Do to #4, there is heavy social pressure against being vegetarian.  Once mentioned, there will be many questions and suspicions.  Read more about this in my article about majority thinking.

6. I have only met 1 Chinese vegetarian before, and she was highly influenced by her Tai Chi master (moral + diet).

7. There are very few vegetarian / vegan restaurants, and they are not conveniently located.

8. Eating out is so cheap that the only benefit to cooking is to control what goes in your food.  Those who eat meat are at an advantage.

9. Eating in China is communal (everyone eats from the same dishes rather than individual plates) and a single dish will not have a variety of tastes.  The vegetarian will have fewer choices of dishes to eat from and thus not have the same variety in his meals - unless all parties are vegetarian (not likely, see #6).   Consider:  a meat eater and a vegetarian go to a restaurant.  They order one dish of pork and one dish of broccoli.  Who wins?

10. There is no vegetarian / vegan section at the supermarket.  You can’t find the big cartons of yummy chocolate/vanilla soy milk.  There is no vegan cheese or vegetarian burger.  You can’t buy vegetarian meat.