By Joel B. Belinan
How did you do it all these years? How do you satisfy your body’s protein and other nutrition needs? Oh, my God! So your food is completely tasteless? These are the common questions I get whenever people come to know that I have been a vegetarian for 33 years. Such questions of course were from the completely un-informed.
Vegetarianism is a challenge to many people especially to those people whose culture did not include such from the very start. For example; in India, there are more carnivorous people than vegetarians but since time immemorial quite a big segment of the population survive on a plant-based diet. In the case of China and other Asian countries, there are people whose diets are vegetarian due to their religions and cultural upbringing.
In fact, based on Japanese history, Japanese people only started eating animal meat when this once hermitic country embraced the western industrial revolution after 1860. Before that, Japanese families were basically on plant-based diets.
Then how did this simple Igorot guy who was supposed to have been “cultured” into the practice of eating wat-wat (meat distributed during feasts called senga or canao) become a vegetarian? The basic and most important thing to sustain your vegetarian diet is to know how to cook vegetarian dishes. Without such knowledge or interest in the kitchen, I am afraid it would be hard for a vegetarian start-up to maintain it unless you can afford to hire your personal vegetarian chef.
Knowing how to cook vegetarian meals also means knowing how to satisfy our bodies’ nutritional needs through the foods we prepare. And such food preparations should satisfy also our eyes and the sensitivities of our nose and palate.
Since embracing this lifestyle, I have been interested to learn different methods of vegetarian cooking whenever an opportunity came my way. At one time, I attended a three-day Indian Vegetarian Cooking crash course in New Delhi, and a fellow from Korea who happened to be a professional vegetarian chef used to ask me to assist him in our kitchen in Singapore to learn his skills.
In our Ananda Marga practice as taught by our Guru, Shrii Shrii Anandamurti, there are three classifications of foods. The first are sentient foods or those that are good for our physical body, intellect, and the spirit. This includes most of the vegetables, fruits, and nuts. But there are some that are good for the body but may be harmful to the mind and spirit. The second classification are the so-called mutative foods or those that may not be directly harmful to the body but eventually become harmful after prolonged or excessive consumption. These may also disturb our minds and hence hamper our spiritual development. Among these are coffee, the sodas or soft drinks, and some spices such as garlic and onion.
The third are static foods or those that are generally not good to the body and also to psychic and spiritual development. The foods under this classification include meat, fish, shells, eggs, alcoholic drinks, cigarettes, and a few more that I could not recall. Foods that are prepared by a mean-minded person even if such are vegetables and fruits may also be considered under this classification.
The question of whether vegetarians can have enough protein and calcium to sustain their physical growth especially those who are in their growing-up years has always been the main question thrown at us. Of course, yes. The protein content of meat such as that of beef and pork is actually very inferior to the protein content of legumes like beans not to mention nuts such as peanuts, almonds, etc. Calcium of course basically comes from dairy products such as milk, yogurt, and cheese which are considered sentient.
We in the Ananda Marga follow this vegetarian diet for health reasons (physical, mental and spiritual) and at the same time for the environment. Thus we have this saying, “Animals are my friends and I don’t eat my friends”.
By the way, let me mention here that there are some people that do not take dairy products including honey as these come from animals. These people call themselves vegans and they choose such a diet mainly due to environmental reasons and to some extent for health reasons. There are many people who choose to be vegetarians because it is part of their religious practices.
Back in 1987 when I decided to become a vegetarian, whenever I went to the market to buy vegetables, I had to go to the stall where they sell tokwa and tofu (soya bean by-products). These two, at that time were our most common meat substitutes. The sales lady would look at me up and down and say, you are an Igorot and yet you are a vegetarian? Of course, I frowned but still smiled at her but didn’t have to explain myself. That time it was really hard on my part as I was still a teenager and dependent on, and living with, my parents.
Then on the fourth quarter of 1988, a brother in the Ananda Marga invited me to stay at his house if I was really serious with respect to my yoga spiritual practice which included being a vegetarian. In short, I found a vegetarian foster family. Eventually, I became a young missionary of Ananda Marga and was posted in Singapore where being a vegetarian was, and still is, common and easy.
Nowadays with advances in technology, we now have all sorts of meat substitutes, popularly called “vegemeats” in this country, making it much easier to prepare a well-balanced vegetarian menu for the family. **
