I grew up in the Jain community with ahimsa as a constant topic of conversation in our family over the dinner table. The Sanskrit word ahimsa means non-harm, and it is the word we built our entire company around. My travels around the world have always carried a Jain perspective of ahimsa, and now over the last 16 years veganism has been layered onto that as well. I’ve taken travelers to the Jain temples of Rajasthan, sat down for the rice rituals of Goa, participated in Mother Earth offerings in Peru’s Sacred Valley, eaten in Buddhist temple kitchens of Japan. Every community we visited had been practicing some version of this idea for centuries: food is inseparable from how we treat living beings.
Veganism as a modern movement has given this ancient ethic a new vocabulary and a growing global audience, and the more we travel, the more I see these two things feeding each other. The indigenous and traditional communities who have been eating plant-based for thousands of years and the contemporary vegan movement are telling the same story. On our tours, getting to know both makes each one richer.
Every destination we do tours in has a plant-based heritage that continues to thrive today. Traveling to these places with an appetite for learning has a way of changing how travelers understand their own choices and deepening their commitment to veganism, long after they come back home.
India: Where Ahimsa Was Born
Jainism is probably the clearest example of plant-based living as a complete philosophical system. Around the 6th century BCE, a teacher named Mahavira developed the principle of ahimsa as a total vow of non-violence, one that extended to every living creature, including the microorganisms in the soil. Jains exclude meat, fish, eggs, and honey. Many also avoid root vegetables because pulling them from the ground destroys the whole plant. Devout Jains will not eat after sunset so they do not accidentally harm nocturnal insects.
Traveling through Jain communities today, what strikes you is how naturally contemporary veganism fits into this framework. Many Jains see it as a logical continuation of what they have always practiced, a recognition that modern dairy and egg production involve harm that their ancestors never had to reckon with. The conversation between Jainism and veganism is growing with organizations like the Jain Vegan Initiative with chapters around the world.
The sattvic diet of the broader Hindu and yogic world runs alongside this. Fresh, seasonal, plant-forward cooking has been understood in Ayurveda for centuries as an expression of ahimsa toward the body and toward other living beings. Ayurveda is embedded in everyday Indian home cooking and now growing across the globe thanks to its easy adaptation especially by the yoga community.
Peru: Plants are our relatives
On the last Peru tour, our group was surprised to learn that the Andes are the birthplace of the potato, with more than 4,000 varieties still growing across the region. They are also the home of quinoa, the mother of all grains. Each planting season, the Inca personally planted the first quinoa seeds as an offering to Pachamama, the earth mother. Corn, kiwicha, oca, mashua, ulluco, yacón, and freeze-dried chuño potatoes rounded out a diet that was, for the vast majority of the population, almost entirely plant-based.
The cosmology behind this food is what stays with our travelers long after the trip ends. Before drinking chicha, the fermented maize beer central to Andean celebrations, people still pour a portion onto the ground as an offering to Pachamama. This practice of ayni, reciprocity with the earth, is the animating logic of Andean agriculture and community life. You give back to the earth, and the earth continues to give.
Originally of the Amazon, our group got to meet the Shipibo-Konibo in Lima. These women carry one of the most sophisticated plant-medicine traditions in the world. Their wisdom keepers, the Onanya, spend decades learning individual plants, each one approached as a teacher with its own knowledge and its own healing song. Peru’s National Institute of Culture formally recognized this lineage as national cultural heritage in 2008. For the Shipibo, as for the Andean farmers in the mountains above them, plants are relatives. Everything else follows from that.
Japan: Where the Act of Eating can become a Meditation
In 1237, the Soto Zen patriarch Dogen Zenji wrote Tenzo Kyokun, Instructions for the Cook, from Eihei-ji temple. It argued that preparing food was as sacred as sitting in meditation, that the attention brought to washing a grain of rice was as spiritually significant as anything that happened in the meditation hall. From this philosophy came shojin ryori, the entirely plant-based cuisine of Japanese Buddhism.
Shojin ryori is built on tofu, yuba, seasonal mountain vegetables, foraged sansai, umeboshi, miso, kombu, and sesame. Before eating, practitioners recite the Five Reflections, a contemplation of where the food came from, why one is eating it, and what intention one brings to the table. It is one of the most complete expressions of mindful eating in any tradition anywhere in the world, and it has been practiced continuously for nearly 800 years.
This sensibility flows through everyday Japanese food culture in the word itadakimasu, said before every meal with palms pressed together. It translates literally as “I humbly receive,” and the fuller meaning is inochi-wo itadakimasu, I receive your life, addressed to the farmers, the rain, the soil, and the plants themselves. It puts into one word what many vegans already intuitively know and articulate through their advocacy for the planet.
Mexico: Why vegans love Mexico City
The Mexican capital of Tenochtitlán, which would eventually become Mexico City, had a population of roughly 400,000 people in 1519, and it was fed largely by maize, beans, chia, and amaranth. Modern nutrition science confirms that these four plants together meet human protein requirements completely. Add avocado, squash, nopales, tomatoes, cacao, vanilla, and chiles and you have a cuisine of remarkable completeness built entirely from the earth.
Amaranth held particular sacred significance in Mexica ritual life, which is why the Spanish banned its cultivation after the conquest. It nearly disappeared. The revival of Aztec ways of eating happening across Mexico today with vegan chefs and at restaurants is part of the decolonization work being done across the country.
Tepoztlán, in the hills of Morelos, is one of the most extraordinary places we take groups. The pyramid above the town is dedicated to Tepoztēcatl, the Aztec god of pulque and fertility, and nearby Amatlán is considered the legendary birthplace of Quetzalcóatl. The market sells blue-corn itacates, tlacoyos, and pre-Hispanic plant dishes that have been part of this community for centuries. The hills around the town are full of temazcal sweat lodges and plant-medicine practitioners.
Sri Lanka: Plant-Based by Default
Buddhism arrived in Sri Lanka in 247 BCE, and its influence on food culture has been unbroken ever since. On each of the 12 to 13 annual Poya full-moon days, slaughterhouses close, and millions of Sinhala Buddhists eat only plant-based food. On Vesak Poya, temples cook enormous free communal meals called dansal for anyone who comes. This has been the way of life on this plant-abundant island for over two thousand years.
Rice and curry in Sri Lanka means dal, pol sambol (a coconut-chili relish that belongs on every table), jackfruit curry, pumpkin, gotu kola salad, banana-blossom curry, and mallum, greens chopped fine with grated coconut. These dishes come from the land and from a long tradition of cooking with incredible spices, coconut milk and the influences of colonialism.
Sri Lanka’s indigenous medical system, Hela Wedakama, predates Ayurveda and works with more than 1,100 native medicinal plants. The Vedda people, the island’s original inhabitants, have maintained their knowledge of wild mangoes, forest mushrooms, finger millet, and yams for longer than recorded history, approaching each plant as incredibly valued with its own relationship to human health and wellbeing.
Travelers on our Sri Lanka tours often remark on how effortless the food is. There is nothing to navigate or negotiate. The cuisine is plant-based because the culture is, and has been for a very long time.
How Ahimsa Travel Club’s Vegan Tours bring you face to face with ancient living cultures
The modern vegan movement has done something remarkable in a short amount of time, shifting global food culture and bringing millions of people into a more conscious relationship with what they eat. Traveling to the communities that have been living these values for centuries adds a kind of depth to our own veganism and ethos, that is hard to find any other way.
Our travelers have been lovingly welcomed by locals around the world, who share their knowledge and practices with us. Each tour we do is a story about how millions of people from past to present love plants and animals, and believe that the earth deserves our deepest respect. Traveling this way tends to change people quietly and lastingly…so bring your non-vegan friends along on our tours! Travelers come home cooking differently and understanding their own values with more confidence and more joy.
Join a vegan group tour with Ahimsa Travel Club at www.ahimsatravelclub.com
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