Vegans consider their diet to be the most natural and healthy diet in the world. But with the possible exception of macrobiotic vegans and raw foodists, vegans eat more processed foods than just about anyone else. There are a few main reasons for this. This entry will cover the first: necessity.
Vegans don’t give up animal products and keep everything else about their diet the same. They have to replace all those meats, cheeses and eggs with something.
Some vegans eat more vegetables, nuts, grains and beans to compensate (basically the macrobiotic approach), but that leaves even the most principled animal lover craving protein. It also would also make the sacrifice involved in veganism all too clear. For vegans to stay vegan, and for new people to even consider joining them, vegans need to think they get enough protein, and they can’t feel like they are missing out on too much. The solution is “fake foods.”
Please don’t go accusing every vegan you meet of eating fake food, though; that makes their diet sound unnatural, and they get defensive. After all, your diet is unnatural. They prefer the terms “mock meat” or “vegan substitutes.”
Tofu is the most famous of these, and the stereotype is true - vegans love it. TVP (Textured Vegetable Protein), a protein extract from soybeans, is the most plausible of the analog meats. Wheat gluten - wheat that has been refined even past the white flour stage down to the (often allergenic) protein - is also a favorite. Tempeh, whole soybeans that have been cultured, is the least refined and healthiest of all these.
Just as you and I have a favorite meat (mine is duck at the moment), vegans have a favorite fake meat.
Some like tofu because it is simple and absorbs the flavor of whatever it is cooked in. If you’re making a vegetable stir-fry, it’s easy to chop up a cube of tofu and toss it in for instant protein. Of course, tofu doesn’t grow on trees:
Tofu is made by coagulating soy milk and pressing the resulting curds. Coagulation of the protein and oil (emulsion) suspended in the boiled soy milk is the most important step in the production of tofu. This process is accomplished with the aid of coagulants.
Calcium sulfate (gypsum) [is the] traditional and most widely used coagulant to produce Chinese-style tofu. Because gypsum is also the primary component of drywall, it is even possible to coagulate soy extracts with ground drywall.
TVP is the most versatile analog meat. One reason vegans think they aren’t sacrificing their taste buds for their beliefs is that TVP is allegedly transformable into any kind of animal product you can imagine. If you’re eating vegan shrimp, vegan moose, or vegan dodo bird, it’s probably TVP.
Vegans look for TVP when they go out to vegan restaurants (normal restaurants, even if they have plenty of vegan options, rarely have it), but it can be complicated to flavor, and many vegans won’t bother with it at home. This is easily the most processed soy product. According to Wikipedia, TVP is a byproduct of soy oil production, and the patent is owned by Archer Daniels Midland:
TVP is made through a process known as “extrusion cooking”. A dough is formed from high PDI (Protein Dispersibility Index) defatted soy flour and water in a “preconditioner” (mixing cylinder) and cooked during passage through the barrel of a screw type extruder such as an Insta-Pro or Wenger model. Sometimes steam from an external source is employed to aid in the cooking process.
Upon exiting the die, superheated steam escapes, rapidly producing an expanded, spongy yet fibrous lamination of thermoplastic soy flour which takes on the various shapes of the die as it is sliced into granules, flakes, chunks, goulash, steakettes (schnitzel), etc. by revolving knives, and then dried in an oven.
A video of this process would be almost as horrifying as any slaughterhouse footage.
Aversion to phytoestrogens steers some vegans away from soy into the stringy white appendages of wheat gluten, also known as seitan. As Wikipedia says, seitan is a popular macrobiotic dish.
The macrobiotic restaurant I worked at in Austin didn’t use it, but every other macrobiotic restaurant I’ve been to and every macrobiotic cookbook I’ve seen includes it. Even as a vegan, I found this strange, because macrobiotics only eat whole grains. They won’t touch white rice or white flour, yet they’re fine with wheat gluten, which is more refined than both of those:
As prepared in macrobiotic practice, seitan consists of powdered wheat gluten, which is extracted from whole wheat flour by washing the flour and rinsing away the starch.
The gluten powder (also called vital wheat gluten or gluten flour) is then mixed with just enough water to form a stiff paste, which is then kneaded in order to produce a firm, stringy texture. The dough is then cut into pieces and cooked via steaming, boiling, frying, or other methods.
The bran comes off during this process too, so the only reason to use whole wheat flour rather than white is for psychological purposes. It just seems healthier.
Tempeh is the reason that many vegans have a vague desire to visit Indonesia one day. That is the birthplace of tempeh, and it is said that tempeh made in Indonesia is a possible vegan source for the elusive and lamented Vitamin B12. Even soy-phobic vegans sometimes eat tempeh, since the culturing process kills some of the phytoestrogens, while also making the soy more digestible:
Tempeh begins with whole soybeans, which are softened by soaking and dehulled, then partly cooked. A mild acidulent, usually vinegar, may be added in order to lower the pH and create a selective environment that favors the growth of the tempeh mold over competitors. A fermentation starter containing the spores of fungus Rhizopus oligosporus is mixed in. The beans are spread into a thin layer and are allowed to ferment for 24 to 36 hours at a temperature around 86°F.
Under conditions of lower temperature, or higher ventilation, gray or black patches of spores may form on the surface. A mild ammonia smell may accompany tempeh as it ferments.
The downside is that by making the soy more digestible, it makes the phytoestrogens that do remain more digestible as well, which defeats the purpose a little bit. Still, health-conscious vegans try to make tempeh their standard mock meat. It has a strong flavor, though, and isn’t very adaptable, so some vegans just don’t like it.
Rice milk and soy milk are the most popular milk substitutes, which also include almond milk, oat milk, cashew milk, hemp milk, and multi-grain milk.
When I was in Prague, I found a store selling quinoa milk, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world, but I’ve never known any other store to carry it. Recently I’ve seen diluted coconut milk packaged as a milk substitute, an almost criminal exploitation of lazy vegans.
“You can’t milk a bean,” is a common criticism hurled against soymilk drinking bovine-avoiders. True, but you can process one until it resembles something like milk:
Soymilk can be made from whole soybeans or full-fat soy flour. The dry beans are soaked in water overnight or for a minimum of 3 hours. The re-hydrated beans then undergo wet grinding with enough added water to give the desired solids content to the final product. The ratio of water to beans on a weight basis should be about 10:1.
The resulting slurry or purée is brought to a boil in order to improve its nutritional value by heat inactivating soybean trypsin inhibitor, improve its flavor and to sterilize the product. Heating at or near the boiling point is continued for a period of time, 15-20 minutes, followed by the removal of an insoluble residue (soy pulp fiber) by filtration.
For all raw soybean protein products, heat is necessary to destroy the activity of the protease inhibitors naturally present in the soybean. The pancreas naturally secretes proteases to digest a protein meal. Eating raw soybeans on a regular basis causes the pancreas to hyper-secrete, leading to benign tumors of the pancreas.
When soybeans absorb water, the endogenous enzyme, Lipoxygenase, catalyzes a reaction between polyunsaturated fatty acids and oxygen (hydroperoxidation). LOX initiates the formation of free radicals, which can then attack other cell components. Soybean seeds are the richest known sources of LOXs. It is thought to be a defensive mechanism by the soybean against fungal invasion.
In 1967, experiments at Cornell University and the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station at Geneva, NY led to the discovery that paint-like, off-flavors of traditional soy milk can be prevented from forming by a rapid hydration grinding process of dehulled beans at temperatures above 80 °C. The quick moist heat treatment inactivates the LOX enzyme before it can have a significant negative effect on flavor. All modern brand soy milks have been heat treated in this manner to destroy LOX.
This is no good for the soy-avoiding vegans, who don’t see the point in milking beans when it’s just as easy to milk grains:
Rice milk is made by pressing the rice through a mill stream using osmosis to strain out the pressed grains. It is sometimes also made at home using rice flour and brown rice protein.
I tried to find more details about rice milk production, but all I could find was an article about dangerous levels of arsenic in rice milk. Huh.
Vegan cheese was almost impossible to get when I started veganism. Most soy, rice and almond cheeses were tainted by the milk protein casein, supposedly necessary to thicken it. Any truly vegan cheese that existed was laughed off the shelves because it couldn’t melt.
Now melting vegan cheese is easy to find. Teese, Sheese and Vegan Gourmet are vegan staples. But looking at the ingredients list for one of the most popular fake cheeses, Daiya, I can see why it took them so long to master this. Who comes up with this shit?:
Purified water, natural whole ground cassava/tapioca and/or arrowroot flours, high oleic sunflower and/or safflower and/or identity preserved high oleic canola oil, coconut oil, pea protein, salt, inactive yeast, vegetable glycerin, natural flavors (derived from plants), xanthan gum, sunflower lecithin, natural vegan enzymes, natural vegan bacterial cultures, citric acid, natural color.
Even Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Topping has fewer ingredients.
There aren’t fake eggs in veganism. With the shell, the white and the yolk, it’s just too complicated to fake. There are egg replacer products, but these only work for baking:
Potato Starch, tapioca starch flour, leavening (calcium lactate [not derived from dairy], calcium carbonate, citric acid), sodium carboxymethylcellulose, methylcellulose.
This works as a riser and a thickener, but pour this powder in a pan and fry it, and you’ll just end up with a liquidy, cellulosey, nearly indigestible white powder.
Sometimes a vegan will stir-fry crumbled tofu and call it “scrambled tofu.” This looks more like scrambled egg whites than actual scrambled eggs, but a handful of turmeric can mask that. Poached and sunny side up have no place in a vegan breakfast, however.
Without lesser-processed breakfast food choices like yogurt, eggs, bacon & eggs or steak & eggs, vegans are essentially forced to start their day the processed way, with cereal drowned in whatever milk substitute they’ve settled on for the moment. This is the most vital meal for vegans, because it prepares their bodies for the onslaught of processed foods to come throughout the day.
Now, it’s not like vegans are the only ones who eat processed foods. We all live in a high-tech civilization, completely detached from our food sources. With factory farms, assembly-line slaughterhouses and fast food ground beef patties and such, there’s no doubt that non-vegan food is processed as well.
But veganism takes industrial agriculture to an even greater extreme, replacing “immoral” foods that at least resemble their source with white powders, spongy globs and factory-molded brown chewy chunks that are nothing like anything in nature at all. It’s one thing to call this more humane, but it’s a little audacious to call this the most natural way.
Coming up: “Why Vegans Love Processed Foods, Part 2: The Magic V.”
