Group 2
Marium Nasir 2016280092
Liu Yinglun 2016213044
Xu Jia 2016213050
For those who are seeking for a way out for vegetarians on campus, a perfect paradigm is just around the corner, literally. The neighboring Beijing University had put in place an all-vegan station in its Yi Yuan cafeteria since 2000. According to Chef Chan of the cafeteria, cooks working in the station are specially trained to process food that meets vegan standards. The utensils involved in the production of vegetarian food, including pans, turners, and trays, are stored and applied separately. No animal product is admissible in the station, and spices like onion and garlic give way to ginger in line with Buddhist mandates.
The Way Out
“Vegetables are easily available in China,” introduced Dr. Ank, a Tsinghua scholar specializing in public health policy. “And running a vegetarian station is in fact cheaper than the regular ones.”
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College vegetarians as a group are merely the tip of the iceberg of the general vegetarian population in China. For the larger community outside campuses, it takes more than a vegetarian window and a few trained chefs to make life easier. To begin with, dining at a vegetarian restaurant is expensive. According to Dianping.com, the Chinese equivalent of Yelp.com, the average expense of a meal at Veg Tiger Veg Food, a chain of vegetarian restaurants in Beijing, is 85 Yuan for each person, higher than most non-vegetarian restaurants of the same class. More importantly, given Chinese cuisine’s traditional reliance on meat, cooking vegetables is a marginalized craft. In everyday parlance, “treating myself to a fancy dinner” is still synonym with “eating more meat than usual.”
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“People just don’t understand that a vegetarian dish can just be as delicious as anything that features meat,” says Shuman, a 25-year-old vegetarian who is studying plant-based cooking in New York after obtaining an MPhil in Anthropology. Using what she has learned from the curriculum of the Natural Gourmet Institute, she is bent upon promoting the appeal of vegetarian food.
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Chef Chan introduces vegan station at Yiyuan canteen, Peking University
Shuman talks about the beauty of plant-based cooking and the future of China's vegetarian restaurants
“It’s not my goal at all to make everyone a vegetarian,” she declared. “My goal is to present the beauty of vegetarian cooking and let people know that consciously eating more vegetables than meat is good for the environment, for the animals and for themselves.”
Upon graduation from New York, she wants to be a consultant for vegetarian restaurants in China to help them create better and cheaper vegetable dishes.
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“China is opening up to all kinds of lifestyle,”she said. “And you will have a big enough market as long as you are good enough.”