Special Diets

Many visitors with special diets, such as vegetarian, vegan, organic, kosher, or halaal are able to maintain these diets while living in China, and Chinese Buddhist monks maintain strict vegetarian diets and there is a large population of Muslims in China, including in Hangzhou, who adhere to the halaal diet. Many of the local vegetable markets in Hangzhou and the Carrefour hypermarket carry natural produce, although limited in diversity and subject to seasonal changes.

There are different standards of natural produce in China, including true certified organic produce (yǒujī shípǐn 有机食品), which requires farmers to license with the state and to refrain from using any fertilizers or pesticides for three years before growing produce; so-called Green Food (lǜsè shípǐn 绿色食品), which allows farmers to license with the state but allows limited use of certain natural fertilizes; and so-called unpolluted food (wū gōnghài 屋公害), which has no set standards, but tends to mean the produce has not been spayed with pesticides. Like the standard symbol for Green Food, Certified Organic produce, which is much less common in the markets, will be marked with this symbol.

However, such diets can be difficult to maintain when traveling to rural regions of China, especially during the home-stay in Tibet, where the mainstay of the diet is yak meat. It is important to note that rural Chinese often use pork lard to fry even vegetarian food, and the use of monosodium glutamate or MSG (wèijīng 味精) as a seasoning for most dishes is prevalent throughout China.

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