Maybe those snowflake 'pubbies need to join the YMCA.
It’s my understanding that Impossible markets primarily to meat eaters, not vegetarians.
According to this dairy-free menu guide claimed to have been created from official Cracker Barrel info, the frying medium for most CB items is soybean oil.
Thanks. I wonder how upset those “traditionalists” are about that.
Yes, here is an old article written from when Impossible Foods was getting its start. You can see what their motivations and goals were.
With Impossible Foods, as with Kite Hill, Brown is reportedly looking to make foods that are not only tasty but which have no cholesterol, hormones, or antibiotics. Its flagship product: a plant-based cheeseburger.
Equally important to Brown — and to investors who are increasingly funding plant-based food companies — Impossible Foods aims to help in feeding the ballooning population of people on earth. Indeed, current forecasts estimate there will be 9.5 billion humans by 2050. In 1940, there were just three billion of us populating the globe.
The idea is to provide “meat” that is paradoxically more natural and yet wholly fake. No hormones or antibiotics, and also no cholesterol. It was also done with the idea of providing food to people who love to eat meat, but without requiring all of the resources it takes to raise livestock.
Note that this wasn’t about vegan ethics or ending the cruel treatment of animals (though surely those aren’t bad side effects), but just not running out of land to raise so many animals.
I personally backed a similarly-minded project on Kickstarter years ago, at the time it called itself Six Foods but later rebranded itself as Chirps. The idea was to provide protein through palatable insect-based foods. In this case, cricket flour. I thought the idea was weird and cool, and their pitch about sustainability swayed me. They also ended up on Shark Tank later and Mark Cuban agreed to invest with them.
The chips are really good, and even weirder, they also sell chocolate chip cookie mix made from cricket flour that’s really nice (I think the secret is the kick of cinnamon).
Cricket flour. What the fuck is cricket flour? Ground up crickets?
…he asked, chirpily. 
Yes. Just as wheat flour is ground up wheat, rice flour is ground up rice, and so on.
How’s it taste?
It’s kind of nutty, sort of like soy protein. Not bad at all.
It seems to vary by person, but to me it literally tastes like dirt.
I’ve had those Chirps chips before, and they tasted like regular corn chips, with dirt.
That’s valid. My mother-in-law can’t eat cilantro because it tastes like soap to her. I wonder if it’s like that.
I don’t taste dirt at all when I eat it, but people taste things differently. It may even be genetic. (Like the cilantro thing.)
I will say that it sometimes is described as having a “subtle earthy taste”, which yeah, sounds like a fancy way of saying it “tastes like dirt”. Though that’s also how people describe the flavor of good mushrooms.
(By the way, I hate mushrooms.)
The earthiness doesn’t really come across to me.
I wouldn’t be surprised.
I’ve had chapulines in Mexico and I liked them. Oddly, I did not think those tasted like dirt. Maybe they’re different grasshoppers, I don’t know. Or maybe it was just that they were coated in some kind of really spicy red chili powder.
By the way, I discovered the term “flexitarian” today. It sounds like someone eating a latex-based diet. (That’s not what it means though.)
It basically means being a vegetarian who eats meat when they feel like it. (Which just sounds like “not a vegetarian at all” but what do I know.)
Otherwise known as “I’m a vegetarian when my girlfriend’s around.”
“Me, I can’t usually get 'em because my girlfriend’s a vegetarian. Which pretty much makes me a vegetarian. But I do like the taste of a good burger.”
–Jules Winfield, Pulp Fiction
I think the idea is that it’s an omnivore - that is, someone who does eat meat - but doesn’t feel a need to do so at every meal, every day.
I’ve known people who are vegetarian at home and in their daily lives but not while traveling to areas where maintaining a pristine vegetarian diet would be difficult to impossible. I’ve known people who are vegetarian outside of family dinners where failing to at least sample meat would cause all sorts of problems withing said family at such gatherings. I’ve known people who only meat once a week, or only on holidays. I’ve known people who moved to largely vegetarian diets for weight control/health reasons but do eat some meat occasionally. And yes, some who are “vegetarian” because of the girlfriend/significant other/main cook in the relationship is vegetarian.
All of the above are not, strictly speaking, vegetarian but they aren’t what folks normally think of when saying “not vegetarian”.
That’s an interesting term, then, because ‘not feeling the need to eat meat at every meal’ represents the vast majority of humanity for nearly all of recorded history.
It’s a rather pointless term unless it describes a person who is largely or primarily a vegetarian/vegan but has no problems with occasionally eating animal products.
Huh, I mostly don’t eat very much meat just because I find it inconvenient to store and prepare, but have no problems with eating it when convenient or I really feel like it. I never knew there was a term for me. Though I guess there maybe needs to be, in this era of toxic men who insist that they absolutely must eat a diet consisting primarily of meat.
I intermittent fast . . . between every meal.