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Chiang Mai’s Veggie Festival -
and that means VEGAN!
(if you want it to)

October is when Thais embrace vegetarianism at an annual nine-day festival and Chiang Mai’s many food outlets will be doing their bit to celebrate. Constanze Ruprecht explores the heady array of wonderful vegetarian and vegan food on offer here in Chiang Mai.

Any Thai or ex-pat with the most basic food-knowledge will tell you: if you’re a vegetarian, Chiang Mai is THE city to visit. It is probably home to the largest number of vegetarian eateries (and places with tasty, meat-free choices) in the country. I’ve been living vegetarian here for going on two years now and still haven’t managed to try all of them.

Surprisingly, despite this abundance, it’s possible to stay in Chiang Mai for quite some time and remain ignorant of its vibrant vegetarian sub-culture. Uninitiated hungry customers, searching for a good meal, may notice rows of yellow flags flying outside ordinary-looking restaurants and wander past without realizing there is any difference to the regular Thai fare of curries, noodles and pork on rice. Veggie food tends to look exactly the same as its meaty equivalents.

Yet once you’ve become ‘a friend of vegetarians’, you will quickly understand that kan kin jae or ‘eating vegan’ in Thailand is indeed a culture all its own, with different groups and preferences, the said huge variety of restaurants – and even an annual festival aimed at self-purification as well as, well, ingesting lots of delicious vegetarian food.

The nine-day vegetarian or ‘jae’ festival - tessagan kin jae - is a Thai-Chinese custom celebrated across the country annually from the 8th to the 16th of October. The number of restaurants preparing vegetarian meals possibly triples, with many regular restaurants setting up temporary ‘veggie tables’ out front or adding special meat-free items to their menus. Veggie places themselves generally make more food and extend their opening hours.

The Vegetarian Society of Chiang Mai – chomrom mangsawirat haeng Chiang Mai, for example, which usually closes on weekends, will stay open continuously during the nine-day festival from 6am to 2pm. In fact, the society is a great place to start your veggie adventure in Chiang Mai. Initiated 18 years ago by a religious movement called Santi Asoke, it’s housed in an airy, barn-like building with adjacent store space.

Khun Put, one of the Society’s 11 members (the staff call themselves volunteers, because none of them gets paid for their work) shares its philosophy: “We created the society based on truly Buddhist principles - to promote compassion by avoiding the taking of lives, which also means no cruelty to animals; to improve physical health; and to solve economic problems by providing alternatives for disadvantaged people.”

In support of this last point, customers can have a full plate of organic brown rice with one dish on top FOR FREE; a sign reads. “One kind, with rice, for 0 baht’. Rice with two or three different dishes costs, at the most, 20 baht. Everything is self-service, including cleaning up after oneself, for which an efficient ‘dishwashing assembly line’ has been set up off to the side of the eating hall. (See below for location).

I don’t know of any other veggie restaurant in town that serves free food, but quite a few are very inexpensive by any standards, and most are motivated by the desire to do good, or at the very least to do no harm, in this world. Many serve strictly vegan dishes, while others include animal products like eggs.

In fact, there are two main concepts in Thailand for eating a meat-free diet: mangsawirat, which is the equivalent of ovo-lacto vegetarianism, while jae, the more well-known term, is the equivalent of Western veganism. It is the latter which is followed during the annual festival. Of Chinese origin, a true jae diet excludes meat and animal products and also, somewhat curiously for Westerners, onions, chives and garlic. I was told that if you eat just vegetables, then these ‘spicy’ additions would be detrimental to your health, as they apparently heat up your body and therefore disrupt a smooth digestive process.

But back to the vegetarian festival. In some parts of the country it incorporates a procession where certain individuals, called mah song -‘mediums’ - , will go into a trance as they move through town. Wikipedia describes them as “the people who invite the spirits of gods to possess their bodies… Only pure, unmarried men or women without families of their own can become mah song. At the temple they undergo a series of rituals to protect them for the duration of the festival, during which flagellation and self-mutilation is practiced.” The largest parade takes place in Phuket, where the mah song “pierce their cheeks and tongues with all manner of things, including swords, banners, machine guns, table lamps, and flowers…It is believed that while they are possessed, the mah song will not feel any pain.”

In Chiang Mai there is only a small procession, so those readers interested in the slightly more gruesome aspect of the festival (at least for those of us watching) will have to change their travel plans and head down to Phuket.

Here in the North, in addition to making merit and eating all this nutritious food, you could impress family and friends back home by learning how to make vegetarian meals – by joining a cooking class. May Kaidee and Taste from Heaven also offer courses that teach you to prepare dishes with flavors distinct to each place.

The latter is probably the only restaurant in Chiang Mai that actively promotes animal rights. Located right on Tha Pae Road, it is tourist-oriented and thus slightly more upscale/pricey – with a kilometer-long menu – than those places catering to mainly Thai residents. The British owner, Roy (formerly a submarine-building engineer), and his Thai wife, Nan, are animal lovers who donate some of the Taste from Heaven’s proceeds to the Elephant Nature Park in Mae Taeng. Unlike other parks where the elephants are forced to ‘perform’ for visitors, pachyderms here live and play in a completely natural setting without any artificial activities, like painting or playing football, added to their daily routines.

Beyond the Tha Pae Gate area (up towards Chiang Mai University), Suthep Road near Suan Dok Temple is lined with a plethora of veggie places. Inside the temple grounds themselves is Pun Pun, serving high quality, all-organic meals to a loyal customer base. The salads are heavenly; though if you come around lunch time, make sure you have a lot of time on your hands.

A little further up from the temple (taking a left as you leave) is a tempting trio of places: Jae Suan Dok, serving veggie food for 19 years, is the ‘grandmother’ establishment - sample the kuay tiao (noodle soup), khanom jin and kaeng ho; Nong Na, a lively young woman of Lahu descent immediately next door, sells out-of-this-world Isaan style grilled (protein) pork, spicy ‘waterfall (protein) pork’ and papaya salad, best eaten with sticky rice; and the youngest neighbor, Baan Khun Maw, offers wonderful fruit smoothies and khao soi noodles - in addition to planning a ‘meatless Mondays’ campaign where all meals will be cheaper. About fifty meters further up the road is yet another place, Jekrayatip, which belongs to the Thai Vegetarian Association.

Around the corner, on Soi 17 of trendy Nimmanhemin Road, is the classic Khun Churn, which has steadily moved upmarket over the years; its lunch buffet spread is still the biggest magnet for most customers. My top dish is the creamy curry with potatoes and tofu.

Finally, to round off my favourite options: in a small mall close to the American Consulate are Baan Suan Pak and the Vegetarian Thai Orchid. The former is more of a market; it has a large selection of chemical-free vegetables, and although not strictly vegetarian (also selling ‘organic’ meat from free-range animals) it deserves a special mention for being the only shop in Chiang Mai to give customers a discount (3%) for bringing their own bags! It also has a lending library and gives refunds for returned bottles.

The Orchid next door is run by Khun Yupa and her husband Wanchai, a lovely couple who are normally on the premises every morning. Their mushroom balls and fried spring rolls are fantastic, and on Buddhist holy days - wan phra - , fragrant brown rice boiled with grains, beans and tubers is served wrapped in large lotus leaves.

Such holy days (occurring four to five times a month, as part of the moon cycle) tend to be busier than others at most vegetarian restaurants, because many of the more pious Thais choose to forego meat on these days as an act of personal merit-making. For the same reason, Thais will ‘convert’ to vegetarianism in large numbers during the nine days of the vegetarian festival. In the Chinese tradition, the festival is held to allow people to pay homage to the Nine Emperor Gods, and this includes a stricter adherence to the five Buddhist precepts than usual: refraining from taking lives, stealing, lying, being adulterous and using intoxicating substances.

The benefits of going veggie in Chiang Mai, for these nine days or all the time, definitely outweigh any negatives – the food is scrumptious, protein-rich, cheap, and an easy path to living totally guilt-free. (In case you didn’t know: eating vegetarian is the single most efficient way to reduce one’s carbon footprint and help stop global warming).

So my advice to all visitors in October, vegetarians and meat-eaters alike, and whether or not you worship the Nine Emperor Gods.

Eat and rejoice!

Smoothie Blues: Nimmanhemin Rd, on the corner of Soi 6; Western-style breakfasts and endless smoothies.

For a longer listing of veggie places in Chiang Mai, look online at:
http://www.happycow.net/asia/thailand/chiang_mai/

Text & Images : Constanze Ruprecht