Scientists have developed a vegetable protein powder that breaks apart like flesh when mixed with water and oil and heated at the exact right temperature in an industrial processor. Time magazine reports:

What has confounded fake-meat producers for years is the texture problem. Before an animal is killed, its flesh essentially marinates, for all the years that the animal lives, in the rich biological stew that we call blood: a fecund bath of oxygen, hormones, sugars and plasma. Vegan foods like tofu, tempeh (fermented soy) and seitan (wheat gluten) don’t have the benefit of sloshing around in something so complex as blood before they go onto your plate. So how do you create fleshy, muscley texture without blood?

The answer makes me think there won’t be a backyard fake chicken trend anytime soon:

First, you take a dry mixture of soy-protein powder and wheat flour, add water and dump it into an industrial extruder, which is essentially a gigantic food processor. (You have to climb a ladder to get to the hole at the top.) At first, the mixture looks like cake batter. But as it’s run through the gears of the extruder and heated to precisely 346°F (175°C), the batter firms up and forms complex striations.

This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder about the naturalness of veganism. My favorite line in the article is, “All this processing raises a question: Will vegans and other gastronomic purists buy a product that is vegetarian but highly processed?”

Yes.

As a vegan, that video would have made my mouth water. But now all this effort to create a fake, morally acceptable but otherwise inferior version of something that readily exists seems a little absurd. Self-imposed ethics force people into some funny contortions.