August 31, 2024
Taiwanese promotes simple vegetarian cooking at Tzu Chi Youth Camp
By Joy Rojas
These days, it’s not hard to be a vegetarian. A variety of fresh vegetables and meat-free substitutes are readily available in the market, and even if you don’t cook, you can create a delicious meal in no more than three simple steps.
Longtime vegetarian Martina Yeh proved it when she led the 90 participants of the recent 2024 Tzu Chi Youth Camp to prepare a plant-based dish with the taste and consistency of chicken. Sitting with their groupmates at the dining area of Harmony Hall, the campers used their hands to shred king oyster mushroom before stir-frying it in a savory barbecue-soy sauce.
“It’s very easy,” she says of the vegetarian lifestyle. “If you have a goal, you will try all of the ways to be successful and reach it. But if you don't want to do it, you will find thousands of excuses to reject it.”
That explains how the Taiwanese Yeh has consistently stuck with vegetarianism for over 30 years. She was about 6 or 7 when she came across news on TV of foot-and-mouth disease spread among cattle, pig, and goat. Though very young at the time, she was struck with this thought: Why do her parents bring her to a hospital for doctors to cure her whenever she falls ill, yet when an animal gets sick, it’s either killed or left to die?
“And then, we had dinner,” she says. “I told my family that I wanted to vomit as I ate pork.”
From then on, she became a vegetarian, eschewing all animal meat and byproducts, except for eggs. At first she would remove any meat in a dish prepared at home. Later, she lived off the cooking of her Buddhist grandmother, then learned to cook on her own through YouTube videos. “In Taiwan, we can easily buy vegetarian food,” she says. “Even the 7-Eleven has vegetarian food.”
Yeh certainly didn’t have a problem in the Philippines, her home for the past 11 years.
“I feel the Philippines is very suitable to become vegetarian,” says Yeh whose favorite Filipino dish to cook is laing (dried and shredded taro leaves cooked with coconut milk), and who likes cooking with kalabasa (squash) and kangkong (water spinach). “Fresh fruits and vegetables are very easy to find.”
And while she closed her online vegetarian food delivery service to pursue other businesses, Yeh was motivated by her short cooking class in Tzu Chi’s Youth Camp to create online videos of her teaching vegetarian cooking in 2-3 steps.
“We’re trying to promote vegetarian cooking in the Philippines,” says Yeh of her latest venture. “That is our dream.”
Martina Yeh demonstrates a three-step vegetarian dish that uses king oyster mushroom and barbecue-soy sauce.
At the 2024 Tzu Chi Youth Camp, Martina Yeh (second from left) goes from table to table to teach campers how to prepare a simple meatless dish.
Cooking vegetarian with friends is easy and fun!
Before the live cooking demonstration, Betty Dizon engages campers in a game that tests their knowledge of vegetarianism.
In their weekend at the 2024 Tzu Chi Youth Camp, participants dined entirely on meat-free dishes, like this delicious vegetarian taco snack.
Kitchen volunteers work hard to prepare delicious, plant-based meals for Tzu Chi’s 90 youth campers.