If you travel to eat you can’t go wrong with 6 tips for the traveling vegetarian. Unfortunately most of us can’t afford the luxury of planning every food intake mission. When you’re lucky to spare just a few minutes for lunch, how do you ensure that you get something fast and vegetarian? Here’s your food court guide to vegetarian eating out.

Mediterranean (or close to it) - Definitely go for salads. If you’re a vegan then skip pizza and Greek salad. You can always ask for steamed veggies (usually cauliflower, broccoli, beans) or baked potato and pumpkin.

Chinese/Vietnamese - Even non vegetarian places will have a pretty good idea how to cook vegetarian food. If you’re a vegan that’s probably one of the best options as they do not use cheese or milk. Even if it’s not on their menu they’ll be happy to make stir fry veggies with tofu and some kind of sauce.

Japanese - Sushi is a pretty safe bet. There are sushi with seaweed, tofu, vegetable eg cucumber, carrot, avocado. Seaweed salad and miso soup is an excellent addition to the above.

Indian - Although almost 40% of Indian population are vegetarians you’d be hard pressed to find a pure vegetarian Indian restaurant or a fast food outlet anywhere but India. Fortunately, almost any Indian cuisine specialist would have a couple of vegetarian dishes. Don’t count on them if you’ve a vegan as milk, ghee and paneer are used nearly everywhere.

Turkish - You’ll be surprised to find quite a few vegetarian options on the menu. Any vegetable that can be stuffed with or wrapped around rice is a go. This includes grapevine leaves, capsicums, tomatoes, eggplant, beans and spinach. Top it up with falafel and you’ll be set for a quick lunch.

If you look carefully you’ll discover a lot more options than I mention here. And just in case you find yourself in a foreign country without a foreign language make sure you head to http://www.allergytranslation.com and order yourself wallet size cards with you dietary requirements listed in the language of your choice. This will make your eating out even easier, and you’ll save yourself lots of trouble trying to explain what exactly you eat.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 11:11 am and is filed under Food, Travel, Vegan, Vegetarian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.