[seanmcdirmid]

I’ve spent time on the Tibetan plateau and suffered from meat overload. We only had meat to eat each night, and my gums began to feel really uncomfortable. I guess at high altitudes, veggies really are a luxury.

India has a lot of carb veggies as well, which I found really interesting. I found it hard to get leafy greens of some sort (the vegetables you need to eat to stay healthy, cooked or otherwise) when I visited Delhi and Jaipur. But that could have just been me picking the wrong places to eat. China has much more leafy greens in my opinion, but again I’m limited in experience when it comes to South Asia. They definitely take the cake in making tofu taste like meat, but I’m not really into that.

[Karrot_Kream]

You're totally right, South Asian diets tend to be poor in leafy greens and tend to stick with protein and carb heavy veggies like rice, grains, cauliflower, lentils, and beans. I've encountered and was raised with a small cultural disdain for leafy greans ("we aren't cows why should we eat like them" is how I've heard it joked about), but this is changing with new nutritional science and greater popularization of Western food fads like salads. Chinese diets definitely have more leafy greens.

I also find Japanese food to be shockingly short on veggies but same thing, it's hard to grow veggies there so a lot is imported, which makes veggies a bit of a luxury. Fruits are ridiculously hard/expensive to get there. Japanese food is a good example of a diet that historically was pretty meat poor and fish rich, though is changing with meat imports and modern processed fast foods like fried chicken ("chikin") and chicken nanban.