Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

by Fuchsia Dunlop

While the concept of vegetarian eating is familiar, many people in China understand it as something that need not be absolute. Some draw a distinction between Chinese ‘vegetarian eating’ (su shi), understood as pragmatic and flexible, and western ‘vegetarian-ism’ (su shi zhuyi), which is viewed as more ideological and hard line. Many lay Buddhists abstain from meat only on certain days, or are content to eat vegetables that have been cooked in the same pot as meat. I once met an elderly Buddhist monk, normally a vegetarian, who told me he would eat meat whenever he felt physically weak. Western vegetarians in China often complain of being given ‘vegetarian’ dishes in which vegetables are cooked with stock, lard, dried shrimps or even morsels of pork. One of my close Chinese friends, a Buddhist believer, is a strict vegetarian and whenever he dines out he has to explain meticulously to waiters that ‘vegetarian’, for him, constitutes food containing no animal products whatsoever; he usually has to enunciate every forbidden ingredient to make sure they have understood what he means.