Eating vegetarian (or vegan) on the road, without the struggle

I've been vegetarian for years, and I travel for a living, so I get the question all the time: isn't it a nightmare to eat meat-free on the road? Honestly? No. It's occasionally a puzzle, rarely a real problem, and in some countries it's the best food of your life. The trick is to stop expecting every place to think like a Western café with a tidy little leaf icon on the menu, and start meeting each cuisine where it actually lives.

So let me give you the honest map — the cuisines where being vegetarian (or vegan) is pure joy, the ones where you have to read the room and ask the right questions, the phrases that get you understood, and the sneaky pitfalls that trip up even careful eaters. No preaching, no moralising, just what I've learned eating my way around.

The places where it's a feast

India is the homeland. It has the deepest, oldest vegetarian tradition on earth, and a huge share of the country eats meat-free by default — so being veg isn't a special request, it's just dinner. A thali hands you a whole constellation of little dishes at once: dal, sabzi, rice, breads, curd, pickle. A crisp dosa with sambar and coconut chutney is one of the great breakfasts of the world. One real caveat for vegans: a lot of Indian cooking leans on dairy — ghee (clarified butter), paneer, curd, milky sweets — so if you're strict, you'll still want to ask. The word that saves you is shuddh shakahari (pure vegetarian), and many places advertise it proudly.

Buddhist Asia is the other quiet paradise. Across China, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and beyond there's a whole tradition of temple and devotional cooking — look for zhai (斋) in Chinese-speaking places or jay (เจ) in Thailand. A jay kitchen is typically fully vegan, no meat, no fish, often no pungent alliums either, and the orange flags that mark Thailand's Vegetarian Festival turn whole street blocks meat-free for days. The Mediterranean is the easy, joyful middle ground: mezze tables of hummus, baba ganoush, falafel, dolma, fattoush, all those slow-cooked beans and lentils — a culture that has always treated vegetables and legumes as the main event, not the consolation prize.

« Ethiopia's fasting days quietly handed me the best vegan spread I've ever eaten. »

And then Ethiopia, which surprised me the most. The Orthodox Christian calendar has many fasting days when the food is, by definition, completely vegan — and the fasting plate, beyaynetu, is a riot of colour: spongy sour injera spread with a dozen little wats, spiced lentils, split peas, greens, beetroot. Ask for ye-tsom (fasting food) and you're set. Connectivity earns its keep here in the least glamorous way: when I'm somewhere I don't speak the language, a quick search for the local words for "fasting food" or "pure veg," or pulling up a map to a spot someone swore by, is the difference between a glorious lunch and a sad packet of crisps.

The places where you work a little harder

Now the honest part: it isn't uniform. Some food cultures are built around meat and fish, and that's not a flaw, it's their culture — your job is to navigate it gracefully, not to judge it. The real saboteurs are the invisible ones. Fish sauce (nuoc-mâm in Vietnam, nam pla in Thailand) and shrimp paste hide in dishes that look totally plant-based — a green papaya salad or a bowl of noodle soup can be quietly built on it. Meat or chicken stock lurks in soups, sauces and rice everywhere. Lard (saindoux) sneaks into refried beans, pastries and tortillas in parts of Latin America. And gelatin — animal-derived — turns up in jellies, gummies, some yoghurts and desserts. None of this is a disaster; you just have to know it's there and ask one more question.

That's where a little prep makes you unstoppable. Learn the phrases that matter in the local language: "no meat, no fish," "no fish sauce," "is there meat stock in this?" Save them as screenshots so they work even with no signal. A printed or on-screen restriction card — there are tidy apps that generate these in dozens of languages — does the heavy lifting in a noisy kitchen far better than my mangled pronunciation ever could. And translation apps let me decode an ingredient label in a shop in seconds, which is how I avoid the gelatin gummy and find the soy yoghurt.

What actually makes it easy

Three habits, really. First, default to the cuisines that are already on your side — when in doubt, find the Indian, Middle Eastern, or Buddhist-veg place and you'll eat like royalty. Second, ask with a smile and zero entitlement; "I don't eat meat or fish, what do you recommend?" opens far more doors than a list of demands, and cooks genuinely love rising to it. Third, keep a thread of data so you can translate on the spot, read labels, look up the local veg spots and check a menu before you commit. None of this requires being plugged in all day — it's the occasional thirty-second lookup that quietly removes the friction.

What to remember

Eating veg or vegan on the road isn't a sacrifice you endure — in India, around the Mediterranean, in Buddhist Asia, on an Ethiopian fasting plate, it's a high point of the whole trip. Learn the cuisines that already love you, ask the right question in the places that don't, watch for the hidden stock and the fish sauce, and let your phone handle the translation when the language runs out. Travel hungry, travel curious, and let the vegetables surprise you.

— Inès, who has never once gone hungry, only occasionally had to ask twice.