Vegetarians in China

“Now Meat Is Raising Red Flags in China” (July 27) implies that somehow the resurgence in vegetarianism in China is subversive and really is an importation from the West, although adherents have gussied themselves up by historicizing their movements. Gongdelin, a vegetarian restaurant in Beijing, has been operating since before the 1949 revolution with complete government approval. All the official guidebooks, since at least the early 1980s, have included discussions of vegetarian cuisine. The White Buddha Temple in Shanghai has been serving Buddhist meals since it reopened after the Cultural Revolution.

The communist government had two reasons to condemn vegetarianism. Vegetarianism was closely linked to Buddhism, so that it was to be attacked as part of the “anti-superstition” campaign. Vegetarianism was fashionable among the wealthiest classes in Shanghai and other cities, both because of the Buddhist merit and because of the enormous kitchen staffs required for traditional Chinese vegetarian cuisine, the hallmark of which is intricate mock meat that really does convince. The juxtaposition of this refined cuisine in cities with the masses of beggars found outside did not endear vegetarianism to the pre-revolutionary-era Communist Party.

JEROME VERED

Los Angeles

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The article on stigmatized vegetarians in China illustrates the potent social conditioning that makes increased meat intake synonymous with improved social status, human progress and “material success.”

In recent years, people throughout the world have chosen to use additional income to raise meat consumption, rather than enhance their diets with a greater diversity of nutritious, plant-based foods. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in the last decade, per capita consumption of beef, pork and chicken has doubled in the world’s poorer nations, though it is still just one-third the level in industrial nations.

In the same way that the world’s developing nations stand at the threshold of a tobacco epidemic, despite the clear and well-publicized link between smoking and health in industrial nations, people throughout the world continue to aspire to the meat-rich diet of Americans and Europeans--a diet we know to be unhealthy, resource-inefficient and ecologically destructive.

The more affluent segments of China are already seeing unprecedented levels of heart disease, stroke, obesity, cancer and other lifestyle illnesses.

How many of the industrial world’s mistakes are developing nations likely to repeat?

BRIAN HALWEIL

Staff Researcher

Worldwatch Institute

Washington