Plant-Based Around the World: Exploring Vegan and Vegetarian Cuisines Globally

Plant-Based Around the World: Exploring Vegan and Vegetarian Cuisines Globally

I still remember the moment in a small restaurant in Chennai when I realized I'd been thinking about vegetarian food all wrong. I was three days into what I'd assumed would be a challenging meatless trip through South India, and I hadn't missed meat once. Not because I was being polite or making do, but because I was eating some of the most complex, satisfying food of my life. The dosa that morning had been thin as parchment and beautifully crisp, served with three different chutneys and a sambar so layered with flavor that I asked for the recipe twice. The chef laughed at my surprise. "We've been doing this for thousands of years," she said, gesturing at the kitchen. "Why would we need meat?"

That trip fundamentally changed how I understood plant-based cooking. It wasn't about substitution or sacrifice – it was about traditions that had evolved over centuries to make vegetables, legumes, and grains sing.

The Ancient Wisdom of India's Vegetarian Heartland

India isn't just one of the oldest vegetarian cultures – it's arguably the most sophisticated. With nearly forty percent of the population following vegetarian diets for religious, cultural, or personal reasons, Indian cuisine has had millennia to perfect the art. What strikes me most about Indian vegetarian cooking is the understanding of how to build complexity without animal fats or proteins. The technique lies in the layering: the initial tempering of whole spices in hot oil (that crackling sound of mustard seeds hitting ghee is something I hear in my dreams), the slow cooking of aromatics, the careful balancing of six tastes in every meal.

I once spent an afternoon with a family in Gujarat watching them prepare a thali. Fourteen dishes. Not one contained meat, and yet each offered completely different textures and flavors – the crunch of bhavnagri chillies, the silkiness of kadhi, the char on fresh rotli. The grandmother explained that balance wasn't just about taste; traditional Ayurvedic principles meant every meal should nourish completely. That's why you'll find protein-rich dal alongside iron-rich greens and probiotic-fermented pickles. It's nutrition science that predates nutrition science.

The Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Mezze Revolution

There's something about mezze culture that makes plant-based eating feel inherently social and celebratory. The first time I experienced a proper Lebanese mezze spread, I counted twenty-three dishes before losing track. Hummus so smooth it was almost liquid, baba ganoush with a smokiness that suggested the eggplant had been held directly over flame (it had), jeweled tabbouleh that was more herb than bulgur, fat dolmas wrapped tight as secrets.

What I've learned from Middle Eastern and Mediterranean vegetable cooking is that fire changes everything—the char on a red pepper for muhammara. The slight bitterness added to eggplant by a hot grill. Even the way halloumi gets those distinctive grill marks – though that's technically vegetarian, not vegan. The region's plant-based traditions draw from necessity and abundance both: in hot climates, vegetables and legumes were more practical than meat, and the incredible variety of produce made creativity easy.

A Palestinian chef once told me that cooking molokhia – that slippery, intensely green jute leaf soup – was how her grandmother measured a woman's patience. The leaves need to be chopped impossibly fine, and rushing ruins the texture. I've never mastered it, but I appreciate the philosophy: good vegetable cooking requires respecting each ingredient's particular needs.

East Asian Precision and Buddhist Simplicity

Japanese shojin ryori – Buddhist temple cuisine – might be the most elegant expression of plant-based cooking I've encountered. The first time I ate at a shojin restaurant in Kyoto, I was struck by how quiet it was. Not just the dining room, but the food itself. There was a restraint, a careful consideration of each element that felt almost meditative—five colors, five tastes, five cooking methods – nothing arbitrary, everything intentional.

The technique that changed my own cooking came from watching a monk prepare sesame tofu (goma dofu). It's not actually tofu – it's ground sesame and kuzu starch cooked slowly until it sets into something silky and delicate. The patience required is enormous. Your arm gets tired from stirring. But rushing it means the kuzu doesn't fully cook, and you end up with something gluey instead of ethereal. That kind of restraint, that willingness to let a single ingredient be the star, runs through much of East Asian vegetarian cooking.

Korean temple food operates on similar principles but with more aggressive flavors – the kimchi is funkier, the doenjang stews richer. A nun at Sanchon in Seoul explained that the difference comes from climate: Korean winters require more fermentation, more preserved foods that could sustain through cold months: same philosophy, different expression.

Latin America's Bean Wisdom

I grew up thinking beans were boring. Then I spent time in Oaxaca and realized I'd just never had them cooked properly. Mexican black beans, when done right – cooked slow with epazote and onion, maybe a shot of mezcal toward the end – become something almost meaty in their richness. The body, that slight slickness from the rendered bean starches, the way they coat your spoon. And that's before you even start talking about the hundreds of varieties of beans throughout Central and South America.

What Latin American cuisines understand is that beans aren't a substitute for anything. They're magnificent on their own terms. A Brazilian feijoada, traditionally made with pork, has vegetarian versions that don't feel like something's missing because the dish was always about the beans anyway. The meat was an accent, not the foundation. Colombian arepas con queso are vegetarian by nature. Venezuelan pabellón criollo becomes plant-based easily because black beans were always the hero of that plate.

The revelation for me was learning about the nixtamalization process – treating corn with lime water to unlock its nutrients. The entire backbone of Mesoamerican civilization ran on corn and beans, and there's sophisticated nutritional science embedded in those combinations. Incomplete proteins become complete when you pair them right. Ancient foodways that kept populations thriving long before anyone understood amino acids.

African Ingenuity and Celebration

Ethiopian food shattered another assumption for me. On my first visit to an Ethiopian restaurant, I ordered the vegetarian combo mostly because I didn't know what else to get. What arrived was a revelation: misir wot (red lentils in berbere), gomen (collards cooked with ginger and garlic), shiro (ground chickpea stew), kik alicha (split peas with turmeric), all served on injera – that spongy, slightly sour fermented tef flatbread that serves as both plate and utensil.

Wednesday and Friday are fasting days in Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, meaning no animal products. Rather than treat this as deprivation, Ethiopian cuisine has built an incredible repertoire of complex vegan dishes. The berbere spice blend alone can have up to sixteen ingredients. Each dish has its own spice profile, its own technique. The slow caramelization of onions that forms the base of many wots happens without oil – just onions and patience, cooking down in their own moisture until they nearly fall apart.

West African cuisines bring similar ingenuity: Senegalese thieboudienne (when made vegetarian), Nigerian moi moi (steamed bean cakes), Ghanaian red red (black-eyed peas in palm oil with plantains). There's a particular genius in how West African cooks use palm oil – that distinctive flavor and color that defines so many dishes. And the use of ground peanuts as both thickener and protein source in groundnut stews shows the same kind of sophisticated technique you find anywhere plant-based cooking has deep roots.

The Thread That Connects

What ties all these cuisines together isn't just the absence of meat – it's the presence of deep knowledge. These aren't modern inventions or trendy eliminations. They're complete culinary systems that developed over centuries, often out of religious practice, economic reality, or environmental necessity. And what they all demonstrate is that when you have to work within constraints, creativity flourishes.

I've watched a Vietnamese Buddhist nun make bánh bao chi without a single animal product that tasted as rich and satisfying as any I've had. I've eaten Jamaican ital food in the mountains above Kingston that made me understand why Rastafarian cooking feels spiritual. I've had Gujarati undhiyu – that elaborate mixed vegetable dish traditionally cooked in inverted clay pots underground – that required nine different vegetables and three hours of prep time.

The lesson from all of these traditions is that plant-based eating isn't about restriction. It's about expansion. It's about learning that protein doesn't only come from animals, that umami exists in mushrooms and fermented soybeans and roasted tomatoes, that satisfaction comes from technique and spice and care as much as from any particular ingredient. When you cook from these global vegetarian traditions, you're not giving up anything. You're gaining access to thousands of years of accumulated wisdom about how to make plants taste extraordinary.

These days, when I cook without meat, I'm not thinking about what's missing. I'm thinking about that Chennai dosa, about proper hummus, about beans cooked low and slow until they're creamy. I'm thinking about all the grandmothers and monks and home cooks who figured this out long before it was a trend, who knew that some of the most nourishing, delicious food in the world never needed meat at all.