According to the article, it’s a meat substitute made chiefly from mushrooms & egg whites. Some nutrients are added, and it undergoes a fermentation process. But this is true for sourdough pancakes, too. Did the FDA have to approve the recipe for sourdough pancakes?
The article tries to clarify by saying:
But this just confuses me. Does Miller mean “It would be [as difficult as] getting eggplant approved”? What was so difficult about that? Is 15 years standard for the FDA or is there some especially challenging problem involved when egg whites are mixed with mushrooms?
Quorn is ok. It doesn’t really have a taste of it’s own though, so you need to make sure you cook it with stuff that does, otherwise it can taste like rubber.
I’ve been using quorn for the past five years (I think, my memory’s going). Since I don’t eat meat, it’s very useful as it has the weight, density and texture of meet.
IIRC we started off with just quorn chunks and quorn mince, good for things like curry and bolognese respectively. Then we moved on to burgers - either ‘chicken’ or ‘beef’ style. You can also get quorn in a variety of own-brand ready meals, with sauces and coatings etc.
Just recently, they’ve starte producing quorn ‘cold meat’ - along the same lines as chicken/ham slices.
I like it - it’s easy to cook with, so long as you remember to use a strong sauce or plenty of herbs/spices.
I remember vaguely arguments when quorn first came on the market as to whether it was strictly vegetarian, as it had egg whites.
As to the original question - quorn burgers are ok. I prefer hte lighter ones meant to resemble chicken burgers.
It is not in the FDA’s interest to approve anything. If a new product comes along (such as a new medicine), and the FDA approves it, and people start dying, the FDA gets blamed. But if they don’t approve it, nobody ever knows how many people died because the FDA didn’t approve it. - MC
That’s like saying it’s not in a doctor’s interest to treat sick people because it opens him up to malpractice suits. If the FDA has sufficient science behind their approvals, blame should bounce off them like bullets off Wonder Woman. I can’t believe that the FDA actually drags its feet because it doesn’t want to be held responsible for the job it was created to do.
Atrayant, trust me MC is right. Just because something is a person’s (or agency’s) job doesn’t mean it is in their interest to do that job to the fullest possible extent.
It is much easier to convict a federal agency (the evil gob’ment) of fucking up in the court of public opinion than it is to convict a doctor of malpractice in a court of law.
And BTW, 15 years is close to the AVERAGE time it takes for the FDA to approve something. And it currently costs about 200 million dollars to put a drug through the approval process.
I wonder how many people who think the FDA is helping us actually know anything about it? I remember people saying that it was worth the delays, because at least it kept the snake-oil off the market.
But nowadays there seems to be more snake-oil than there ever was. It’s just marketed differently enough to take it out of the FDA’s jurisdiction. In the meantime, the useful drugs are tied up in regulatory knots.
It might be that the underlying question in the OP is whether or not the FDA has to approve things that are food products made from existing food products.
I may be oversymplifying here, but if we have eggs on the legal market and we have mushrooms on the legal market, then why does the FDA need to approve a product made from eggs & mushrooms?
Maybe Elvis actually died from eating too many non-FDA-approved peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
Side question: Is the product pronounced “Kworn”, “Corn”, or “Koo-orn”?
