The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church keeps one of the most demanding fasting calendars of any Christian tradition, with observant members expected to abstain from meat, dairy, eggs and other animal products, and in the strictest fasts from food altogether until a set hour of the day, for roughly two hundred and fifty days across the year when all individual and communal fasts are added together, including the Great Fast before Easter, the Fast of the Apostles, the Fast of the Assumption and every Wednesday and Friday outside the festive seasons.
Injera, made from fermented teff flour batter poured onto a large flat griddle and cooked into a soft, spongy, slightly sour flatbread, contains no animal products in its traditional preparation and requires no adjustment at all to fit a fasting day, unlike almost every dish it is served alongside, which must be reworked into a vegan version for the fast to be kept. Wat, the spiced stew normally built on meat and often finished with butter, becomes a lentil, split pea, chickpea or vegetable stew, misir wat or shiro among the most common, cooked in oil rather than butter, and it is this fasting version of wat, not injera itself, that carries almost the entire weight of observance.