I’m a meat eater, so are my friends and their friends. Eating a lot of meat is also a “side effect” of the Armenian national cuisine. Meat is the pride of the table and an inseparable part of Armenian traditional dishes. I’ve never found vegetarian dishes particularly enticing but that day I did not return the order. I decided to try it, and what's more, I took it as a challenge to become a vegetarian for a week, . It was complicated, it was interesting.

More and more people are giving up animal based diets in the world. The number of vegetarians and vegans is growing in Armenia as well. The question is to what extent are these “non traditional diets” compatible with social settings in Armenia and local culinary recipes? 

The idea behind the vegan raw food movement is that people were initially vegans and ate everything raw. This seemed natural to Lilit and at one point during her quest to find out more, she passed the point of no return. 

Lilit now has her own blog where she posts health food recipes for vegans, gives lifestyle advice and of course, talks about her own experience of raw eating. “I started the blog in January but I began to update it more regularly when I realized that people are looking for such information. The responses were quite encouraging, it motivated me and I in turn motivated others,” Lilit remembers. 

The first month was about giving up meat, then dairy and then eventually it came down to simply washing the produce and eating because the raw eating movement does not assume anything else. Lilit believes cooked food is simply a repository of poisonous material that accumulates in the organism over time. To cleanse means to get rid of the accumulated harmful material, explains Lilit. 

This bothered Izabella. Society rarely gives people a chance to change but she believed a person can not always march in place, do the same thing over and over again; people need to be moving forward and develop. Izabella decided to surround herself with people who know how to respect her decisions, just like she respects theirs.

People think that being a vegetarian comes with restrictions, deficiencies. That is nonsense says Izabella: “In 2016, when I was climbing Mount Kazbek with the Armland group, the guide was extra attentive towards me throughout the climb. He was constantly reminding me to eat meat or a piece of basturma if I start to feel faint. I categorically ignored his suggestions because I was sure that my health would more than allow me to conquer the peak. I still remember the scene that opened up from that peak with the greatest pleasure.” 

Even though it is easier now for a vegetarian to eat out, there is still room for improvement. “I believe the situation has changed over the years. Before, it was complicated and very unpleasant. They would tease you, the service would get worse and you only had 0.1 percent of the menu to choose from,” remembers Narek.

Still, quite recently, Narek had gone to a restaurant in Gyumri and inquired if they had anything without meat: “By some curious logic, I was told that they had ham and cheese, hot dogs and barbecued fish.”

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Dietary social norms, customs and traditions involving food are associated with family, friends and social bonding, especially in many Armenian households. Sharing food is indeed a social ritual and those who have decided for a variety of reasons to be vegetarians or vegans can sometimes come face to face with social isolation.

Luckily, however, this is slowly beginning to change. And today, there is less and less need to excavate menus to to find something to order and the good old reduction technique of asking for a Caesar salad without chicken or pizza without ham will hopefully be a thing of the past.