Original post: https://www-146.ibm.com/corporateservicecorps/node/5323
As many of my team members have discovered over the last few weeks, I am having an extraordinary experience with the Malaysian food culture. Simply put, I am a lacto-vegetarian and I do not eat seafood, chicken, beef, and pork. I have been a vegetarian all my life. I will occasionally have eggs if it’s hard to find protein. I often get asked a lot of questions about my diet, “what do you eat for protein?” “why don’t you eat meat” “why are you vegetarian”. The bottom line for me is eat what you wish as long as you are healthy by some medical standards – and I am very health! Growing up in an East Indian household in Canada, I find that Indian food itself covers most of what is needed for me to remain healthy. But I enjoy variety, and as my friends know I love Italian, Mexican, Thai, and Japanese food!
The first week in Malaysia was difficult; my diet was mostly based on rice or noodles with eggs. I actually would have preferred if there was variety, for instance, I like tofu and soy but it was difficult to find dishes with these as substitutes for chicken based dishes. The constant servings of rice and noodles for breakfast, lunch, and dinner was especially difficult.
Most of the true Malayan food includes seafood, as well. I really experienced this when we were invited to the convocation at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia to have a VIP lunch with the Sultana. Every dish contained meat, and so my lunch was plain rice, oranges, and grapes. There were only a few times where I had difficult options, such as this instance. In these situations I have typically found myself bargaining with the waiter to alter their dishes to be vegetarian, which was an experience in itself – sometimes successful and sometimes not!
We resided in Johor Bahru’s city center for two weeks and in the remote areas of Selang for the latter two weeks, both of which have been good areas to find true Malaysian food. In Johor Bahru’s city center it was easy to find Western, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean at the city center mall. However, food that touched my heart has to be the Indian food served on a banana leaf. I have never eaten so much food with such fresh and homemade taste for what is equivalent to $1.25 USD. There are full vegetarian meals for Indian food so it’s not difficult to order. Our team has made several trips to banana leaf and we will miss it dearly.
All in all, it’s been a wonderful food experience for me and now in our last few weeks I am now finding a perfect balance between the food available here and my vegetarian diet.
admin IBM Corporate Service Corps Corporate Service Corps, CSC, food, johor, malaysia, vegetarian
