I was discussing with a new friend the origins of “fake meat” – it happens to be deeply rooted in ancient Chinese cuisine. Beyond meat is 1000 years behind chinese monks. Fuschia Dunlop (one of the great writers on Chinese food) comments below - but I first heard it from my Mum and I’ve eaten some of the food in Asia.
...Vegetarian cooking in China owes a lot to Chinese Buddhist monks, who have existed in the country since the late Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE), after Indian missionaries brought the religion to this part of Asia. One tenant of Buddhist ideology is vegetarianism. Not wanting to break tradition when outsiders came to visit their monastery, China’s Buddhist monks would copy classic meat-based dishes, replacing the meat or fish with vegetables, tofu, or gluten.
Dunlop: “The imitation meat dishes are particularly associated with Buddhist monasteries, although monks themselves live on very simple vegetarian foods, they also have to entertain people from the outside, like patrons, potential benefactors, and visiting pilgrims.”
“A lot of these people would have been normally eating meat but they would eat vegetarian food when they went to a monastery.”
“There are records from the Tang dynasty, which is 618 to 907, of an official hosting a banquet serving imitation pork and mutton dishes made from vegetables. In the 13th century, which is one of the great periods of Chinese gastronomy and culinary development, there were restaurants in the southern Song dynasty capital, which is today's Hangzhou, where you could eat Buddhist vegetarian dishes.”
Dunlop in a 2019 Podcast / Chinese meal with Tyler Cowen mentioned how Chinese can view being vegetarian a little more flexibly:
“…But vegetarians in China do have a bit of a problem, and that is because the Chinese approach to vegetarian eating is very different from the Western approach. So in China, people often make a distinction between Chinese Su Shi 素食, vegetarian eating, vegetarian food, and Su Shi Zhu Yi 素食主义, vegetarianism. Many Chinese people believe in Buddhism and will have vegetarian food when they go to visit a temple or on certain holy days, but they don’t abstain from meat all the time. I’ve even met an elderly monk who was a lifelong vegetarian who said that when he was sick or weak, he would eat a little meat to boost his strength.
So vegetarians traveling around China have this problem, that sometimes they ask for vegetarian food, and it has little bits of meat in it, or it’s cooked with lard or stock or dried shrimps. It’s quite hard. You have to really insist to restaurants that “I am a total vegetarian. I don’t . . .” You have to list the things you don’t want, to explain.
The only place that traditionally you would get pure vegetarian and even vegan food is in Buddhist monasteries, and sometimes Taoist monasteries. The larger ones have their own restaurants which cater for pilgrims and patrons and do extraordinary vegetarian cuisine. So partly it’s simple vegetarian cooking, and partly it’s Fang Hun Cai 仿荤菜, imitation meat dishes. Impossible Burger, they got there centuries before you! So you can go in Sichuan to a monastery, and you can feast on spare ribs and shark’s fin and sausages and gong bao chicken, and they’re all totally vegetarian.
One change in the last few years is that there are a small number of Chinese people, maybe cosmopolitan, intellectual types in cities, who are becoming vegetarians in that Western way. It is, actually, often connected with Buddhism, but they are abstaining totally from meat, and not only from meat, but also from Wu Hun 五荤, the pungent aromatics like garlic and all kinds of oniony vegetables, which is also part of the Buddhist diet.”