Localized Practices of Plant-Based Cuisine: Vegetarian Restaurants in Eastern China

In this talk, I share some reflections and initial fieldwork findings from ongoing research on plant-based restaurants in and around Hangzhou, Zhejiang province and at Mount Jiuhua, a Buddhist holy mountain in Anhui province. Approaching plant-based restaurants as sites of culinary and ethical entrepreneurship, the talk explores the localized culinary strategies through which restaurateurs and chefs in Eastern China further their religious and other ethical projects. I consider the material practices of vegetarian restaurant cuisines, including flavour combinations, cooking methods, and the uses of vegetables, legumes, fungi, and roots. Further, I reflect on the dynamic relationship of these vegetarian restaurant cuisines to local agroecosystems and regional culinary traditions. Addressing recent discussions on the ethics and challenges of meat avoidance in China, I suggest that the study of localized strategies of vegetarian cuisine offers us useful insights into the cultural significance and future potential of plant-based eating in China’s ‘meatified’ culinary landscape.

Jakob Klein is Reader (Associate Professor) in Social Anthropology at SOAS University of London. He co-convenes a master’s program in the Anthropology of Food and is a former chair of the SOAS Food Studies Centre. Klein has been conducting research on Chinese food cultures since the late 1990s and has published articles and book chapters on topics including regional cuisines, food safety, vegetarian restaurants, the heritagization of local foods, and potato-promotion. He is an Area Editor for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies and the co-editor of several volumes, including Modern Chinese Foodways (MIT Press, 2025), Ethical Eating in the Postsocialist and Socialist World (University of California Press, 2014), and “Consumer and Consumed: Humans and Animals in Globalising Food Systems” (special issue of Ethnos, 2017).