But none of this is meat.

They're all made out of soy or mushrooms.

Faux meat is all the rage these days.

Brands like Beyond Meat and Impossible all have their version of a fake beef patty that sizzles and even bleeds like the real thing.

Yet it is entirely plant-based. That looks like a burger.

It smells like a burger.

It tastes like a burger.

But while it's now trendy in the West, did you know imitation meat has been a part of Chinese cuisine for over a thousand years?

To get to the origins of it, we have to look at Buddhist monasteries in China.

Imitation meat started there, where monks and nuns have long abided by a vegetarian diet.

Here's a professor of Buddhist studies with more. "Imitation meat can serve as kind of a substitute in the practitioner's

transitional period from non vegetarian to vegetarian.

It was created for visitors of China's monasteries and for transitioning monks.

So this one we have is one of our best-sellers.

It's citrus spare ribs, and you can see that I just stir-fried it with a little bit of carrots.

The moment of truth.

Holy shit. Oh my god. Wait. Which one was this one again?

This is citrus spare ribs. All vegan.

So no dairy, no eggs.

It's so chewy.

I think the texture is so nice.

This is Lily, and she's the owner of Lily's Vegan Pantry, which has been in New York for 25 years.

Her family started selling faux meat products in the States because there wasn't initially much of a mock meat scene in the city.

We're a religious family.

So my mom grew up in Taiwan.

Um, but whenever she was in Taiwan, she always had delicious vegetarian food, whether it was tofu or mock meat, and it's always grew with her.

And when she immigrated here, like 40 years ago, there was nothing.

So she decided to bring everything over.

Their target audience includes people transitioning into vegetarianism.

You're a meat eater, but you're slowly turning into a vegetarian.

You want to try it out, but you don't want to eat all the crappy stuff. Like you don't want to just stick with non-flavored tofu or just veggies.

So we came up with, like, mock chicken, mock beef, where they use soybean as well,

but they put in all the flavors. So it's basically a replacement or substitute for what you would usually eat at a restaurant.

They have their own line of faux meat products, including spare ribs, chicken, and even fish.

Next item that we have, product that we have, is our kung pao chicken. So you can see that there's chili inside.

It's one of our spicier products.

They also have fake fish fillets flavored with seaweed.

It looks like meat, tastes like meat, but just isn't meat.

But the one thing that makes Chinese vegetarian food stand out from other meat alternatives?

It doesn't contain any allium plants.

Wait, what's Allium?

Allium is a genus of plants that includes onions, garlic, scallions, shallots, leeks and chives.

They aren't used because their flavors are said to excite the senses.

Okay

We don't eat leeks, scallions, onions and garlic. So these are considered as strong flavor items, and supposedly they will bring our desires out, so these are off our diet.

And so what used to be a byproduct of Buddhist cuisine,

today, fake meat has made its way into the mainstream and is getting closer and closer to tasting exactly like really meet.

This is David, and he's the founder of Omnipork, a company that specializes in faux pork products for the mainstream Asian market.

Omnipork is made of proteins extracted from peas, soy, mushrooms, and rice.

In our case, the pork can be used in dumplings as stuffing, in dim sum, as mince on top of a lot of things.

Or, of course, you could turn it into a meatball or meat patty.

Traditionally, many people who are vegetarian are because of religious reasons.

Now what the new age,

what this cutting-edge food companies are doing is they are targeting the meat eaters.

Faux meat has come a long way from its Buddhist temple origins. And as technology progresses, one day soon, it will be indistinguishable from the real thing.

Fun fact.

Did you know that Buddhist weren't always vegetarian?

The Buddha never banned his disciples from eating meat in early stages,

but later, as time went by, more religious groups started to take a vegetarian diet as their kind of a lifestyle.

One of the first mentions of vegetarianism was in a Mahayana sutra, written in the second century.

It argued for the diet on the grounds of having compassion for living animals.

Mahayana is a branch of Buddhism. A Mahayana disciplinary book specifically asking the practitioner to abstain from eating meat as a minor rule of that manual.

But vegetarianism wasn't widely practiced among Buddhists until the sixth century when Emperor Wu, the founding emperor of the Liang Dynasty, came to power.

He was a devout Buddhist and very religious.

He actually summoned monks and nuns, nearly 2000 of them, to the capital in his palace to hold two conferences on the topic of meat eating.

After the first conference, there were protests from monks and nuns saying that, "Well, you are not Buddha because our founder, our great teacher, never said that meat is not edible."

"We are allowed to eat meat."

"So who do you think you are?"

The emperor didn't listen to them and instead issued an edict ordering them to all stop eating meat.

From then on, vegetarianism became a practice in Buddhist monasteries and continues to this day.