Or the Vegan Sausage Taste Conundrum for that matter. Here’s the story - Mrs Trep and I walked past a restaurant today which had a board outside advertising it’s latest thing, Vegan Tuna. Well, okay, it must be vegetable something or other processed in such a way as to approximate to tuna - but that begs the question: how do they know?
Let’s presume that there had to be a testing process; and that a panel of tasting experts must have concluded that it tastes like tuna. The only way of doing that is by comparing it’s taste to, well, tuna. And that means tasting tuna; and that requires the killing of tuna. On the face of it, you have to conclude that tuna died in the development of the product.
Can that really be vegan?
Are there vegans on the board who can put me right on this?
j
Full disclosure: I ate a vegan sausage on boxing day. Based on its similarity to an actual sausage in terms of taste and texture, I would estimate that approximately zero real sausages died in the development of that product. I’ll be willing to mark that one down as truly vegan, no argument.
Or, maybe they were assuming that it could just taste like whatever, so long as it smelled OK, because the vegans who could tell it didn’t taste like tuna wouldn’t admit it.
When The Daughter decided to become Vegetarian, I took her to Loma Linda Market* and we picked up a huge variety of things!
LL brand fake proteins have cutesy-poo names: Veg Stakes, Soyettes, etc etc.
I picked up a can of (wait for it!) “TUNO.”
Some things she liked, some were so-so. Her father considers tuna sandwiches to be the foundation of any healthy diet. And when he slaps bacon on them, even unhealthy diet! The kid was raised on tuna.
She opened the can one day, mixed the contents with mayo, pickle and onion, and made a sandwich. Almost immediately thereafter, she was stuffing the sandwich and the rest of the “tuno” salad down the garbage disposer. She said not only was it horrible, she didn’t want anyone else in the house to eat it by mistake.
Perhaps the problem was not having a taste-tester to evaluate the product?
~VOW
*Loma Linda, California, has a huge population of Seventh-Day Adventists
You make a good point if one is vegan for ethical reasons. It would be unethical to have a vegan dish that was created by slaughtering animals for testing. Many of ethical vegans also forgo products that have had animal testing in their development. However a out may be a new vegan who has tasted animal before but vows not to again.
It also seems to exist with the issue with should we use medical research done by Nazi Germany if it can help people today and even can save lives?
We can get into counter arguments where now more people can go vegan because they have food options more people can live with, thus less animal deaths overall.
I don’t have a answer to any of these arguments - except that one ‘out’ I mentioned, and until a revelation or a conclusion, I will stick with the words of Paul "
Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a person to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble."
This would seem to be the obvious solution to the problem.
Those of us who are omnivores are not necessarily averse to eating ‘vegan substitutes’ for meat products…we just don’t tend to seek them out, unless it’s out of curiosity.
Probably a nonvegan taste testing was how they did some of the better products, the worse products probably winged it [and i did try tuno, and it was that dire … blargh.] Some of the scrambled tofu fake eggs are pretty decent, and there are some recipes for vegan breakfast burritos are pretty good. I regularly eat tofu based General Tso and it is just fine.
I am more than willing to have vegetarian and vegan foods, for my sister and brother in law I am willing to play with recipes to come up with vegetarian stuff with no alliums [garlic, onions, shallots] because they follow some practice where they are forbidden [working on a seitan roll with stuffing as a mock turkey. I want to find a roast chicken looking and sized mold I can use to bake it in to shape it =) ] I have figured out how to use egg white to emulate a fish fillet [cook the whites in a jelly roll pan, cut into slices and use more raw egg white to glue the strips together so they look like the flakes of fish in a steak, then dip in more whites or whites and yolks beaten as an egg wash to hold breading onto the mock fillet. Looks pretty much just liek a breaded fish slab =) ] Funky fake foods were a mainstay of fancy medieval and rennaisance banquets so the idea of making fake foods is fine with me. Maybe I will figure out a way to turn bread sticks into bones =)
I’ve had vegan “tuna” salad sandwiches made with mashed-up chickpeas mixed with the other ingredients you’d ordinarily use in tuna salad. It was quite good. Many, if not most vegans, didn’t start out that way, and fully remember what a tuna sandwich tastes like.
I still don’t understand why vegans have to make fake food. Why don’t they appreciate the flavors of the foods they eat rather than make a poor approximation of foods they don’t eat?
That said, this thread reminds me of a discussion I once had with an orthodox Jewish colleague. He was stating that he didn’t miss shellfish since he could eat surimi which was a crab substitute. I wasn’t sure whether to tell him that surimi is not crab, doesn’t resemble good crab in either taste or texture and IMNSHO is only useful in cheap California rolls where the real thing is either not available or too expensive.
I think the point for some vegans is that no animals be harmed at any point in the production of their food. So if real fish had to be killed in order to perform the taste tests used in developing this tuna substitute, then the tuna substitute that resulted cannot be described as vegan.
You don’t need a side-by-side test. No one expects “vegan tuna” to taste exactly like tuna. You just need someone familiar with tuna, either a non-vegan or a vegan who used to eat tuna, and have them taste it. Does it tastes good? Does it remind one of tuna? That’s probably all you should expect.
How many vegans have been vegan their whole lives? I’m guessing there are plenty of vegans who remember what tuna tastes like from their non-vegan days.
The sort of vegans who are that pedantically purist generally also are the types who avoid processed foods anyway, so it’s rarely going to be a practical issue.
I’d guess the fakey stuff is more suited for the newly-Vegan.
Young adults who “don’t want to eat anything with a face” often end up eating bread, French fries and a garden salad when they eat out with friends. It truly isn’t enough to become a righteously indignant Vegan. You have to educate yourself about all types of foods, understand essential amino acids, and learn how to get enough protein in your diet.
Young adults are often still building brains and muscles, and they NEED protein. It isn’t quite as complicated as Diet for a Small Planet would have you believe. You don’t need to protein-balance for every meal. But you do need a balanced diet, with many nutrients. Until you are ready to do the research and reorganize your pantry, the protein analogs will keep you from starving.
Since the fakey meats are hideously expensive, the research will have to be done eventually.
~VOW
It seems to me that purists who want to avoid causing any animal deaths are fooling themselves.
Agriculture is going to involve the destruction of natural habitats. It’s going to involve the elimination of pests. Mechanical harvesting of things like soybeans will likely kill some ground nesting birds.
I’m not preaching against vegetarianism or veganism. There are sound ecological and health reasons to eliminate or at least reduce our consumption of meat. But living on planet Earth involves competition with other living things and unless you’re willing to lose that competition you will, at least indirectly, cause deaths of animals.
I think most vegans probably do just cook vegan food, rather than fake meat food. These products exist largely as ‘entry-level’ options, perhaps to help persuade non-vegans that they don’t have to give up everything.
Here’s the thing: KFC is currently selling a vegan ‘no chicken’ sandwich in UK restaurants. It would have been much easier for them to create a vegan menu option in the form of a ricebox or burrito with some beans and pulses, but that would have very little market impact. I went to KFC to try out the no chicken sandwich last week, and everybody was buying it.
Quorn (cultured fungal protein), quite apart from the way it can be made to resemble meat, is an interesting technical solution to the sustainable production of quality protein for feeding humans - it has a lower carbon footprint than tofu, for example.
What variety of sausage? In my exploration of the market, sausages are the thing where I’d say the approximation to meat-based recipes has come closest - perhaps because sausages are so processed anyway.
I am not a vegetarian, but I am very curious about all kinds of food - I once (on the recommendation of a veggie friend, who said it would be awesome) tried some vegetarian ‘fish free king prawns’.
The sort of looked OK, but the flavour and texture was bizarre - they somehow managed to be simultaneously rubbery, crisp, mushy and spongy - sort of like chewing a mouthful of wet rubber bands. The flavour was also very odd - it was what could honestly be described as ‘fishy’, but not in any kind of good way - like ‘this fish has gone off’ sort of smell, not ‘mmmm, fish!’
I guess meat flavours are probably easier to fake than seafood flavours.
