The Deep Roots of Asia’s Plant-Based Heritage

October in Phuket. White-clad devotees wind through streets draped with yellow flags, each stamped with distinctive red characters. Woks hiss with frying tofu skins. Vendors ladle jackfruit curry over rice, arrange mock-meat skewers, pour coconut milk over shaved ice. For nine days during the Jay Festival, this entire community eats no meat, eggs or dairy, as well as no pungent roots like garlic and onion. The yellow flags mark participating restaurants and stalls, transforming the city into a map of possibility.

Across Asia, plant-based foods have roots running centuries deep, embedded in religious practice, cultural ritual and everyday cuisine long before Silicon Valley discovered oat milk and veggie burgers. The Jay Festival, observed by millions in Thailand as well as Chinese communities in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, represents just one thread in a tapestry of deep-seated traditions that transformed soybeans and grains into protein when these ingredients were still largely unknown in other parts of the world.

THE ANCIENT ARCHITECTURE

Dawn in a Seoul temple kitchen. A monk stirs a pot of kombu and shiitake broth, steam rising like incense. The mushrooms were picked yesterday from the monastery’s mountain. The seaweed arrived wrapped in paper, a gift from coastal devotees. This recipe hasn’t changed in four hundred years.

As early as the sixth century, Emperor Wu of Liang promoted Buddhist vegetarianism throughout his empire, establishing temple cuisines that would evolve over centuries into sophisticated culinary arts. By the Tang Dynasty, monks had documented wheat gluten—miànjīn—transformed into mock meats so convincing that visiting dignitaries couldn’t tell the difference. These weren’t substitutes born from scarcity but innovations born from devotion, each dish a meditation on compassion.

The tradition spread and evolved. In Japan, Zen monks developed shōjin ryōri, temple food that treats cooking as spiritual practice. The thirteenth-century master Dōgen wrote the Tenzo Kyōkun, elevating the temple cook to a position of honor, describing how to transform simple vegetables into enlightenment. Every cut, every seasoning, every arrangement on the plate becomes prayer.

Korean temples practice barugongyang, formal meals where seasonal vegetables and fermented pastes are consumed in ritual sequence. No garlic, no onion—nothing that might inflame passion or cloud meditation. Instead, mountain herbs, lotus root, mushrooms foraged at dawn. The monks eat in silence, each bite a teaching about sufficiency and gratitude.

THE ORIGINAL ALTERNATIVE PROTEINS

Central Java, morning. Women sit on woven mats, laying out banana leaves like sheets of green paper. They spoon boiled soybeans onto each leaf, fold them into packets precise as origami. By tomorrow, white threads will have knitted the beans into firm cakes, protein transformed by time and tradition into something that tastes of nuts and earth and home.

Tofu arrived during China’s Han dynasty, over two thousand years ago. Not as poverty food or health trend but as discovery—soybeans transformed through nigari or gypsum into silken blocks that could be fried, steamed, fermented, frozen. It spread across Asia like language itself, each culture adapting it to local tastes. Japanese yudofu simmered in hot springs. Korean dubu pressed firm for stews. Malaysian tahu goreng fried golden and stuffed with vegetables.

Indonesia created something entirely new. Tempeh appears in the Serat Centhini, written in 1815, though the practice is far older. Soybeans inoculated with Rhizopus mold, wrapped in banana leaves that impart their green perfume while enabling fermentation. The leaves aren’t just packaging—they’re part of the alchemy, their waxy surface creating the perfect microclimate for transformation.

Plant-derived proteins like tempeh and tofu weren’t seen as substitutes—they were celebrated as themselves, complete, sufficient. The original plant-based innovation, created through centuries of refinement and tradition.

FESTIVALS OF TRANSFORMATION

A gurdwara kitchen in Petaling Jaya. Volunteers stir pots large enough to bathe in. The dal has been cooking since midnight. The vegetables arrived at dawn, donated by a Muslim greengrocer. Chinese aunties roll chapati alongside Punjabi grandmothers. Outside, a queue forms—flood victims, foreign workers, anyone hungry. This is what plant-based food looks like at scale: not individual choice but collective care.

The Jay Festival transforms entire cities. Across urban landscapes like Bangkok, Phuket, Penang and Singapore, families who typically eat meat every day switch completely, not from guilt or activism but from tradition. Street vendors swap their regular menus for plant-based versions. Even McDonald’s offers jay burgers. The collective shift is absolute, temporary, and repeated annually like seasons.

Chinese Buddhist festivals follow lunar calendars, marking holy days when temple kitchens open to the public. During the seventh lunar month, temples across Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia serve elaborate vegetarian banquets. Whole communities gather for meals that prove plant- based food can be celebration, not sacrifice.

But perhaps nothing matches the scale of Sikh langar. In gurdwaras across Malaysia and Thailand, volunteers prepare free vegetarian meals for anyone who enters—no questions about religion, caste or citizenship. During the 2021 Klang Valley floods, Kuala Lumpur’s gurdwaras served between 7,000 and 15,000 meat-free meals daily. Vast pots of dal simmering with cumin. Mountains of chapati. Sabzi bright with turmeric.

PAST AS PROLOGUE

Back in Phuket. The yellow flags flutter like prayer ribbons. Incense smoke mingles with frying oil. A teenager photographs her meal for Instagram—mock duck curry that her great-grandmother would recognize, now traveling through fiber optic cables to reach millions.

Across Asia, countless dishes have long-standing plant- based variants, woven into daily life without fanfare. Coconut-based laksa, in versions rich with tofu puffs and vegetables. Buddha’s delight—braised vegetables and mushrooms served at Chinese New Year. Gado- gado—Indonesian salad dressed in peanut sauce. Indian idlis with coconut chutney. Japanese inari sushi—sweet seasoned tofu pockets filled with rice.

These dishes aren’t marketed as plant-based. They’re just food, ordered without thought or ceremony. And they make clear that plant-based eating in Asia draws from its own deep traditions and local ingredients. The blueprints already exist in grandmother’s recipes, temple kitchens, street stalls.

The roots are here, have always been here. Not imported from the West but grown from Asian soil, watered by Asian hands, seasoned with Asian spices. The question now isn’t whether Asia can embrace plant-based foods—it already has, for centuries. The question is how to help these roots grow again, spreading from temple grounds to shopping malls, from festival days to everyday, from tradition to transformation.