Hi Vamsi – I expect you will mostly be fine. Many of the curries and dahl are vegan, not using egg or mushrooms. Some vegetarian rotis may contain eggs so you may need to check with each place you eat.

It’s petty clear that what they meant was that locals consider being pescatarian to be pure in terms of their religious beliefs.

I can confirm what Inga & Dileep said. If you tell Sri Lankans that you don’t consume milk, they will say the food doesn’t contain milk, same goes for eggs. The reason is…. most people who avoid such things do it because of a religious reason and it’s important in their eyes for things to be “out of sight and out of mind” This is the same logic that’s used by Buddhist Monks that consume beef etc.

Majority of the milk is imported in dry powdered form from New Zealand. And there is heavy investment ensuring that everyone feels that milk is absolutely essential. It’s the one thing that surprise Sri Lankans the most about when I mention what veganism is.

Even coconut powder by Major brands (used in only in cities) contains around 25% milk. The sugar is imported from the cheapest sources where bone char is used (nearly 90% of sugar consumed in Sri Lanka is of this nature while it’s ironic that it exports coconut sugar!)

I’ve been in Sri Lanka for 23 months so far and it’s been paradise as long as I’m completely raw or cooking at home with unprocessed ingredients.

Sri Lanka: Regular vegan’s hell, pescatarian/vegetarian’s home, and raw vegan’s paradise!

Pescatarian? Don’t be silly, you give the movement a bad name. We know now, eating seafood is wrong. Overfishing and octopus smarter than you, are reasons enough.

Hi Inga and Dileep, thanks for reading and commenting. We stayed with a lot of local hosts and mostly ate in our homestays. We asked the ingredients of the food often because we’d love to be able to recreate the dishes and were nearly always told that they used coconut milk in the cooking, especially of curries. Cow’s milk wasn’t on the ingredients list of any of the meals we enquired about the ingredients of and I’m not sure how many of the families had milk available. With tea we were usually served it black or with powdered milk, which makes me think cow’s milk is quite uncommon. One of our homestay hosts said that they have such an abundance of coconuts that they nearly always cook with coconut milk and coconut oil. I didn’t ask about the use of butter or ghee though so that could certainly be possible. We also found the cooking in restaurants quite a lot different from the homestay food we ate and I have to be honest that we didn’t enquire about the ingredients. The Sri Lankans we met though loved sharing their recipes, were very proud of their cooking and were happy to adapt if explained (and never had a problem with cooking vegetarian food). Hope you enjoyed your travels in Sri Lanka :)

For vegetarians there are lots of options. Also there are lots of ‘Pure Vegetarian’ where no eggs are used. Unfortunately, they compensate by over using butter and ghee. We’ve had to walk out of pure vegetarian restaurants where every dish contained milk in some form or another.

Oh they eat so much more than rice! They really have an incredibly exciting food scene!