Vegan and vegetarian Chinese vocabulary

[wushijiao]

Vegan not only means not eating animal products (meat, eggs, dairy, whey, stock...etc), but also encompasses the idea that unnecessarily killing animals for human pleasure is not acceptable. In other words, killing animals in order to make food, clothing, cosmetics, or other by products is to be avoided. On the positive side, you could say that living in a vegan way helps us live by the moral principles we probably already agree with anyway, such as non-violence (ahimsa) by showing compassion to other beings.

Since veganism implies a worldview beyond simply eating style, it is worthy of the 主義. However, from a purely pratical point of view, I wonder to what extent does the vegan message need to be tailored to the particular socio-political context in the mainland. For example, I was about to post Gary Francione's introduction to veganism flyer in Chinese. However, I noticed that somehow the Chinese version, compared to the English version, seems quite a bit more radical, and all but the most politically inclined would be put off.

For example, it might be worth talking about how eating a plant-based diet has a long history in China, since many Chinese Buddhists traditionally wanted to give animals the gift of being free from fear (through taking on the precepts, or through the paramitas), and many others even recognized the Buddha Nature of other living creatures, and thus avoided eating them. Perhaps researching about and talking about this history could be a good gateway to explaining veganism.

[imron]

我基本上只吃素食。(I am a vegetarian.)

Hehe, I guarantee that if you say 基本上, the chef will still sprinkle bits of meat all throughout what would otherwise be a vegetarian dish （基本上是素食，只有那么一点点肉）

[Kenny同志]

说不过你，呵呵。

So we should always say 我只吃素食。

[rezaf]

There is a beautiful text in our 醫古文book which might be useful if anyone asks why you are a vegetarian/vegan. 孙思邈 says: “自古明贤治病，多用生命以济危急，虽曰贱畜贵人，至于爱命，人畜一也。损彼益己，物情同患，况于人乎？夫杀生求生，去生更远，吾今此方所以不用生命为药者，良由此也。”

ps. Maybe someone could translate it into English?

[Kenny同志]

ps. Maybe someone could translate it into English?

自古明贤治病，多用生命以济危急，虽曰贱畜贵人，至于爱命，人畜一也。损彼益己，物情同患，况于人乎？夫杀生求生，去生更远，吾今此方所以不用生命为药者，良由此也。

My attempt

Since the Old Times, it had been a practice among great doctors to treat acute and dangerous diseases with medicine made from living animals. Although it is said that animals are inferior and men are dignified, when it comes to cherishing life, there is no difference between the two. Harming others for the sake of one’s own benefits is detested by all forms of life; and we're humans! To sacrifice the life of animals to save our own life is all the more against what the word "life” means. This is exactly why I refuse to use living animals in this formula.

I am not a native English speaker.请诸位不吝赐教。

[skylee]

Now this is a very personal opinion. I find this valuing "life" thinking a bit hypocritic. Why are only animals' lives considered lives but not plants' and vegetables'?

[Ludens]

Why are only animals' lives considered lives but not plants' and vegetables'?

A lot of kg. vegetables are needed to produce 1 kg. meat. So, even if you value the lives of animals and plants equally (do you really?), if you want to do the least harm, it would be best to eat plants directly, instead of feeding (XX times more) plants to animals, and then eating the animals. But, let's try to stick to the vocabulary and phrases here ;)

[rezaf]

I think you are a very good translator Kenny! just a small suggestion: by 此方 he means all of the formulas in 《千金要方》so it might be better to say "these formulas"

ps. for those who don't know: Formula in TCM is a combination of herbs in a prescription

[anonymoose]

Why are only animals' lives considered lives but not plants' and vegetables'?

Because animals are conscious and have feeling, whereas plants do not.

[rezaf]

Because animals are conscious and have feeling, whereas plants do not.

They do, but in a different way

[wushijiao]

Now this is a very personal opinion. I find this valuing "life" thinking a bit hypocritic. Why are only animals' lives considered lives but not plants' and vegetables'?

It's fairly simple: if one were to 1) kill a cow with a knife and 2) to pull a carrot out of the ground. Which act would most people feel more comfortable with? I've met people from the Mid-west who have worked in slaughterhouses -- which is actually one of the most dangerous jobs in the US -- and to a person they have described their jobs killing screaming animals all day as terrifying and soul-crushing. I have yet to hear someone talk that way about gardening.

But even if one were to seriously argue for plant sentience, as Ludens mentioned, eating animals still requires a large input of plant food. On the other hand, there are some people who do take plant sentience seriously, and when combined with ecological factors, they choose to eat a raw fruit diet (since the fruit comes from the tree without the tree dying) and also eat some greens from trees or plant that they grow themselves. Personally, I think that going too far, since it seems fairly apparent that animals have brains that process pain relatively similar to how humans process pain. Most people don't enjoy being branded, beaten, raped, enclosed in small spaces...etc, so why would other mammals fairly similar to us also want to experience those same things?

[Kenny同志]

I think you are a very good translator Kenny! just a small suggestion: by 此方 he means all of the formulas in 《千金要方》so it might be better to say "these formulas"

Rezaf，你过誉了。I know there's still much room for improvment.

And thanks for letting me know it’s 千金要方.

[Ludens]

casein: 酪蛋白

rennet: 凝乳酶

whey: 乳清

These are mainland translation so I'm not really very sure how they will work out if you travel to Taiwan or Hong Kong (but they probably will just use English in HK). And if you tell the waiters/waitresses these words in China I am quite sure most of them will have no idea what you are talking about.

I wasn't intending on telling these terms to waiters/waitresses, I'm trying to build a vocabulary for figuring out if (supermarket) products list any non-vegan ingredients. Any other animal-derived ingredients that we're missing here?

On a somewhat related note (although not so common in China); could anybody tell me about the difference between 奶酪 and 干酪? Are they used differently / for different products?

[laobaixing]

Having lived in China for 3-4 years as a vegetarian, I suggest never saying 我是素食主义 - most people won't know what you mean. Even when they think they do, its often a little off. A friend of mine had a dinner a few years ago, and someone, hearing that there would be a vegetarian there, brought some 豆腐干 that had been flavored with 鸡精 (rendered chicken fat). Presumably the assumption was that I don't eat flesh, but meat products were cool. I also find that 我只吃素 doesn't really work that well (and 素 is different than grain, isn't it? So it isn't even accurate.). I find it best to say what you don't eat before you order, ask if there's meat in it when you're ordering it and then tell them not to add it after you order. 我不吃肉不吃鱼不吃海鲜 and then 所有的我点的菜一点的肉，鱼，海鲜，都不放. Now, why say them all? I once ordered an eggplant dish and asked if it had meat in it. When I asked them not to add meat, the chef decided to throw in a little fish for flavor.

Doing that, I've been pretty successful in avoiding meat.

[skylee]

When I asked them not to add meat, the chef decided to throw in a little fish for flavor.

That chef behaved like a hair stylist.

[Kenny同志]

@laobaixing

Theoretically, telling the waiter or chef that 你只吃素 would suffice but in reality we often get disappointed because the served dish is often not that vegetarian.

Except monks and nuns, vegetarians are rare in China. At least I know of no other vegetarians in my real life, though I am one. My experience tells me that people won’t take it very seriously when you tell them at dinner or in a restaurant that you’re a vegetarian. More often than not they would simply assume you can tolerate bits of meat no matter how you stress the fact that you eat no 荤腥.

Unfortunately some of the chefs who would take your instructions seriously sometimes have difficulty distinguishing 素 from some man-made animal products. That’s why they get puzzled when you complain to them that the dish is not what you want.

[Pendragon]

I actually changed my eating habits while in China. After a while I　figured out how to ask for vegetarian food, it's easy to avoid pork, beef and chicken though they sometimes still add seafood (so tell them explicitly that you also don't eat 海鲜 (hai3xian1). But the social aspect was too complicated to me.

In Holland food is not such a big deal, everyone just orders the food they like and that's it. But if you're invited to a Chinese dinner there are lots of customs you should take into account, unless you don't mind coming off as a foreigner who doesn't want to blend in with Chinese culture (no offense). In a formal dinner the host decides what food to order, maybe he'll ask the guests what they like to eat but you're not supposed to give him a long list of your requirements. If you didn't have a chance to talk to the host beforehand and it turns out he ordered meat, then showing you're unhappy about this during the dinner will make the host lose face in front of his friends or colleagues (which is a very big deal, especially in a business dinner). So I decided to eat vegetarian whenever possible, but just eat whatever I get at a dinner and try to enjoy it. It still reduces animal suffering by 99% compared to eating meat daily since I usually cook my own food. Anyway if you don't go to formal dinners you probably wont get into this kind of situation very often, and it's still everyone's personal choice. Just something to take into account besides the vocabulary.

[ouyangjun]

I know I'm joining this topic a bit late, and reviving a year old thread... but I just started joining these forums.

I'm a vegan and have lived in China now for 4+ years. I actually have no problems with it anymore (in the beginning there were challenges). In regards to the losing face part at dinner, this is the one time that always get worried. What I normally do is have one of my Chinese employees who is out to dinner with us tell the host that I'm a vegan. It usually works well. The dinner gets ordered with enough vegetables, me being a vegan always comes up as to why and we all carry on drinking beer or baijiu and having fun.

The one word that didn't pop up on here, 维根, is the term I've seen a lot lately being used for vegan in China. I'd say most Chinese people would not understand that, but if you're in a bigger city like Shanghai and hang out with a younger/health conscious crowd, they may have. My vegan girlfriend (Chinese) is the one who originally introduced me to the 维根 term.

[Ludens]

Thanks Ouyangjun, I've never come across 维根 before. How is this used? Do Chinese vegans actually call themselves 维根, or do vegan restaurants?

Anyway, congratulations on finding a Chinese vegan girlfriend

[prateeksha]

I wish I could have seen this topic earlier.

I am a vegetarian, a very strict vegetarian. I do not eat from the utensils which were used to cook meat. And it was a very minor aspect of my life all along, until I landed in China. It was then that I realised how easy it is to be a vegetarian in India, there are countless eateries everywhere where you will not find even a speck of something that once had blood in it, some going to the extent of not even serving 葱蒜. One could go to KFC with meat-eating friends and happily eat a veggie burger with a "We cook vegetarian and non-vegetarian food in separate oils" sign all over the restaurant.

Welcome to China.

I went to this "English-speaking" restaurant in the campus and ordered a vegetarian sandwich, clearly instructing to not put any 荤腥 in it. The sandwich I got smelled funny, only to find out it was tuna. On another instance at a KTV, I had this very nice and excited Chinese friend who said that she also does not like to eat meat, and certainly she will order "safe" food for me. A typical KTV room is pretty dark inside, and I could see some small bits scattered all over my boiled vegetables. When I asked her what it was, she said it's just a little chicken. Yet another time while craving french fries, I went to a local McD with a Chinese friend and asked her to ask the server what oil they use for cooking fries [there was this huge uproar in US some years ago when it was found that McD used beef tallow to cook fries while maintaining that their fries are 100% vegetarian]. And the answer [quite expected] was, 不知道.

Never again.

Even if I am dead tired, ill or busy with exams - I cook for myself. No better way than this to guarantee the purity of food. I luckily had a Malaysian 华裔 roommate for the first few weeks when I came here who absolutely would not eat meat and she introduced me to common 小吃/other processed foods which did not have animal products. Of course there are Buddhist vegetarian restaurants here and there, but for a 留学生 on a budget it can be extremely difficult to afford it more than once in a blue moon. I have met other vegetarians from different countries here who would just go to 食堂 and tell them not to put meat in stuff. They do not want to think what actually goes inside their food, or how it is cooked. And then there are others [usually from my motherland] who would cook in the dorm kitchens.

To sum up, if you are really strict about your diet, cooking yourself would be the best way out. Misunderstandings can occur anywhere, and at the end of the day, we really cannot blame the Chinese.