They don’t all, and I can also understand wanting to address the taste-void of meat and cheese etc dishes that one might miss if one had not always been a vegan. But at the same time, yeah, there does seem to be a lot of that and I find it annoying too. There’s a lot of good recipes for vegan food (much of which is incidentally rather than intentionally vegan, btw) and it’s delicious; I’m not a vegan and I seek it out because I love the stuff! (Ethiopian and Indian vegan items in particular, yumm!) But stuff like that doesn’t get touted anywhere near as much as fake meat, fake cheese, fake ice cream, etc.
That’s like saying: If the person serving you your vegan food in a reastaurant ate bacon and eggs for breakfast, the energy expended in carrying the plate to your table came from the exploitation of animals. How can ***that ***food be vegan?
It’s a silly concern. Unless the companies manufacturing these products are routinely exploiting animals in the ongoing manufacture of their products, it’s silly to consider the whole product line poisoned by the development process - there are enough people who know what meat tastes like to serve on tasting panels.
At some future point, if the consumption of meat is so vanishingly rare that nobody is available to verify if FakeSteak™ really tastes like real steak, it won’t matter anyway.
The market is accustomed to meat. If you want to invite them through the door, offering them something familiar just makes sense. Small steps are a very effective way to deliver change.
Another good thing about these mainsteam vegan offerings is: They are automatically OK for lactose intolerant people; they also offer an option to people on Halal or Kosher diets.
Don’t get me wrong - I actually welcome the idea of fast food restaurants selling menu offerings that are nutritionally balanced, and aren’t trying to be meat, but I feel like the fake meat thing is a logical step toward that - open people’s minds to the idea that it’s possible to enjoy a meal that contains no meat, and once that barrier is broken, other things become possible.
TVP-based sausages should be able to get quite close to the real thing. Certainly TVP can match the texture of ground meat, and for the flavor, you just choose a target sausage that’s heavily spiced, like chorizo, so the flavor doesn’t depend as much on the meat itself.
A lot actually don’t. A number of the ethical vegans I know don’t like fake meat at all, as it does remind them of animal flesh. It’s certainly not a majority, but certainly not all vegans feel the need to eat faux animal products.
And a lot of the people buying fake meat are actually not vegetarian or vegan. They’re meat-eaters just like me.
Like see here:
From here.
What happened is this: it was boxing day, we were at a party thrown by friends, and one of their extended family is vegan, I have dietary restrictions (no red meat) which have pushed me towards more vegetarian eating, and I was chatting with this vegan lady about the food that had been specially prepped for her. “Have one of the sausages”, she said, “You can hardly tell that they’re not meat”. That’s all I know about their provenance.
So far as the development of the sausages goes, distant and fading memory is a possible explanation for their flavour (and texture).
Use of roadkill in the sausage flavour testing program is perhaps the more likely explanation. By the way, Roadkill Tuna is an Australian punk band.*
j
-
- no it isn’t, I made that up. But it should be, and if we all wish hard enough, maybe we can make it happen. If you’re wise, Filbert, you’ll register the name yourself, right now.
Are you sure it wasn’t supposed to taste like the other tuna?
One thing I have noticed a tiny bit (not so it’s a big problem) is a tone of slight annoyance from some vegans (or from people who say they’re vegans anyway) - I guess there’s a small but vocal contingent who liked to use their ethical choice as one-up on meat eaters, and are perhaps a bit miffed that meat eaters can just switch pretty easily now.
You had me going for a moment there - and hey, ignorance fought, I’ve learned something today. I now feel like I know more about the world than I did when I woke up. But in answer to your question, it was a branch of Wagamama, and I googled it and yes I am sure.
**HOWEVER - this just in (same article): **
So I have answered my own question - actually, they know for a fact that it DOESN’T taste like tuna. That’s why they call it vegan tuna. Obviously. :smack::smack::smack:
I now feel like I know LESS about the world than I did when I woke up. OK - as I alluded to in the OP, let’s talk about the taste testing of vegan sausages instead…
j
Like Former Smoker Syndrome?
j
Could be, and it’s understandable - if you go to any great effort to make a lifestyle change, I guess it can be really annoying to see someone else do it more easily.
(I found quitting smoking to be a pretty simple thing to do, BTW)
More along the lines, I would say, of people who won’t buy make-up that has been developed using animals. My question relates to how an honest attempt to match a flavour, by using animals in development, sits with vegans. I would say it’s a reasonable thing to ponder. Not in a too serious way, though – it’s not Great Debates material.
That said, I’m beginning to wonder if any attempt is made to pitch for that authentic meat (or fish) flavour. We may be edging towards an understanding here.
j
I’d say possibly the most clear example is going to be the ‘impossible’ products - in order to formulate their products, they had to empirically analyse meat to determine what makes it taste, smell and behave like meat; this will inevitably have required some meat products to analyse.
Some other meat-style products may not have needed to do this - they may just have designed the product based on generalised desired properties.
There was a SF book I read one summer back in the early 1970s [which I would love to reread but I have no idea of title or author] where a bunch of people lived in a dome city surrounded by wilderness, one gathers after some sort of world catastrophy, The protagonist is a flavor synthesizer who was particularly proud of developing a very popular ;strawberries and cream’ flavor for their synthetic foods, until he somehow ends up outside the dome and gets to taste real strawberries and real cream …
Back in the mid 70s we ate a fair amount of TVP in ‘meat’ sauces [lasagne, spaghetti] and I remember the people who ran the food coop out of their house also had beef, ham and chicken chunks, ground beef and ground sausage TVP. THe ham was smoke and salt, the sausage was salt and sausage seasoning, no idea what the beef and chicken chunks were flavored with, I don’t really remember Mom every really doing anything except the beef crumbles in sauces. I think she also subbed out some regular ground beef in meatloaf with TVP.
And they get so testy when one points out they are using a formulary that was previously animal tested. THE FDA when it comes to makeup and cosmetic products don’t make you test if you use GRAS [generally regarded as safe] products in your new spiffy “not animal tested” products.
Not to mention, my understanding is that you shouldn’t eat something that even resembles a forbidden food. Given that surimi is explicitly designed to mimic crab (visually, at least), this seems like a no-no.
Hardcore Vegans don’t want anything even resembling meat. One type of meat analog is made with wheat protein, and it’s called SEITAN. With a helluva lot of work, you can make it at home. It’s essentially flavorless, so you gotta doctor it up to imitate meat.
The thing is, Seitan has a grain to it, like meat. Flavored and slathered with sauces, it can bear more than a passing resemblance to meat.
And the hardcore Vegans reject it.
~VOW
Source?
I know a few vegans. They all enjoy seitan. My SIL is a pretty hard core vegan. Her email address is along the lines of “veganlove@isp.com”. She’s happy to eat seitan. When I eat with her at vegan restaurants she usually has a dish with seitan.
Anecdotal info I picked up doing research when I became Vegan in…hmmmm…2003? I bought books, I read stuff all over the internet, and I participated in several message boards. It would probably take ten years to dig it all up again.
I didn’t say all Vegans reject Seitan. And there are devout Vegans and then you get to the hardcore ones. I’ve made Seitan. I even once made tofu. I had a soymilk maker, and I made soymilk often.
I met some wonderful people who have a webzine called “Vegetarians in Paradise.” I was newly-diagnosed with Diabetes, and I was exploring Veganism for health. I had so many questions, and so many ideas, those kind people offered me a column as a guest contributor!
Go down the page and look for the index. You should find, “Using Your Bean.” By VOW, of course!
~VOW
The more you learn…
And, of course, seitan can be made into dishes where it doesn’t particularly look like meat. I don’t eat “fake meat” but I’ll eat seitan in a stir fry or something.
I get this.
Let’s say, hypothetically, I’m a person who rejects eating human flesh, for ethical reasons. Let’s then posit that some company creates a product called Hooman Flesh, which is made out of pork but modified to taste exactly like human flesh. Why would I want to eat this? I find the idea of eating human flesh abhorrent, why strive to mimic the experience?