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proteins out of the partial proteins found in plants, either by supplementing them with dairy products and eggs (not an option for vegans) or by obsessively pairing plants rich in a few of the nine essential amino acids (protein building blocks that our bodies cannot produce) with those rich in the others. Nowadays, matching complementary proteins is easier than in 1971 because, the experts tell us, essential amino acids can be matched up over the course of an entire day rather than at every meal. A few even claim that we needn’t worry about complementarity at all. But the simplest solution is to make dishes, like many of the best recipes in Diet for a Small Planet, that draw on the familiar third-world combinations of cornmeal and beans, pasta and beans, rice and soy, rice and lentils, and so forth—all somehow discovered long ago by cultures that depend on plants for much of their protein, and all quite delicious.

Most vegetarian, whole-food, health-food, and organic restaurants pay much greater attention to their ideology than to their cooking. Their dishes are typically artless, often drawing (promiscuously and sloppily) on real or imagined foreign dishes. American vegetarians eat vegetables because they hate meat. Europeans eat vegetables because they love vegetables. Nearly all the voluntary vegetarians in the world (those not vegetarians from poverty or religious belief) live in America and England. Neither group is known for its skills in the kitchen.

The first thing you notice about a restaurant’s menu is how high up the food chain the chef has dared to climb and which foods on the lower rungs he or she has chosen to exclude. All pollo-vegetarian restaurants seem to allow fish (though some pesco-vegetarians avoid shellfish on the grounds that these are scavengers and bottom dwellers), but some oddly eliminate the ovos from which the pollos came, not to mention the milk that flows like kindness from the pollos’ barnyard neighbors. It is common to find ovos where lactos are excluded and vice versa.

Not even every plant food is welcome. Many restaurants do not offer alcohol, whether fermented from barley or hops or grapes. Some do not even let you bring your own. Others eschew the dark, aromatic liquor of the roasted coffee bean, and most banish the purest, whitest forms of sugar and flour. Restaurants following strict Buddhist rules also eliminate onions, scallions, and garlic, which are thought to inflame the passions, while most macrobiotic restaurants flee from members of the nightshade family, such as eggplants and tomatoes. One man’s poison is another man’s essential amino acid.

China, Japan, and India—unlike the United States and the countries of northern Europe—have strict native vegetarian cuisines of long standing and great sophistication. The exquisite Japanese shojin ryori, or Buddhist temple cooking, does not seem to have immigrated to this country; its principal protein combination is rice paired with the myriad forms of soybean curd. Unlike shojin ryori, Chinese Buddhist cooking specializes in what you might call facsimile food, astounding imitations of traditional meat and poultry dishes in which wheat gluten, tofu, textured soybean protein, arrowroot, and chopped yams simulate animal flesh; bean curd and potatoes stand in for fish, fresh walnuts for crab, cabbage for chicken. Versions ranging from crude to creative (with or without onions and garlic) can be found in at least seven New York City restaurants. As 80 percent of the population of India is vegetarian (according to estimates I have read), its cuisine is rich in plant protein combinations, especially if one is willing to supplement the rice-lentils-wheat-chickpea quartet with a teeny bit of raita, made with yogurt. I was unable to find a truly admirable vegetarian Indian restaurant in any of the five boroughs.

And so my month of dining at two-thirds of New York City’s vegetarian restaurants was, on the whole, excruciating. The intricate vegetarian cuisines of Japan, China, and India should make it obvious that when you eliminate most of