Interview With a Fake Meat Eater: Tracy King

Tracy is an omnivore who reviews vegan and vegetarian fake meat products on her blog Adventures in Fake Meat. She graduated from culinary school last May and works as a baker in Minneapolis, where she lives with two cats, her partner and a Japanese exchange student. After writing Adventures in Fake Meat for a year and a half, she believes that she has eaten more varieties of fake meat than most actual vegetarians do in their entire lives. So what does she think… is vegan “meat” the yummiest of all?

Most omnivores are content with real meat. What made you give fake meat a try? 

I kept finding myself with vegetarian friends, so I knew my delicious meat-filled cooking wasn’t going to wow them. I wanted to see what the whole fake meat thing was all about, but I couldn’t find any reviews that told me what I wanted to know - specifically, does this taste and feel like real meat? Too many fake meat reviews are written by people who haven’t had meat in years and have forgotten what the experience is like.

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--Tagged under: Vegan Food--

--Tagged under: NonVegan Interviews--

Should Vegans Have a Blood-Drenched Wedding?

bloodybride

It’s amazing how much talk of vegan weddings Chelsea Clinton’s non-vegan wedding generated.

Since The New York Times, Gawker, Jezebel, Feministe and Vegansaurus! gave their respective takes, a lot of people have been asking me “What does Let Them Eat Meat think about vegan weddings?” Well, the blog has changed over time so I can’t speak for the entire thing, but I can tell you what it thinks now.  

Let them be vegan!

Sure, if I’m at a wedding, I’d rather the reception have meat. But if two vegans are getting married, I expect it won’t. And I can understand why it wouldn’t. 

As a young vegan with Hollywood dreams, I thought I’d force my cast and crew to eat vegan food while they were on set. Of course I expected to have a vegan wedding. Realistically I might have compromised if I’d married an omni, but it would have been a major issue for me. 

Now that I eat meat I can see the other side of it. Vegans believe “vegan food is for everyone” because few people have serious moral qualms with fruits and vegetables. To vegan thinking, then, meat is divisive while vegan food is inclusive. Vegans expect meat eaters to enjoy vegan food as much as they do, not realizing that Morningstar Farms and Daiya have aided and abetted a collapse in their culinary standards. Go to NYC’s Veggie Conquest if you want to see how easy to please vegans are. It’s more of a challenge to appreciate “yummy vegan goodness” when you’re used to animal products and have no moral hang-ups. 

Vegans compare snippy omnivores at a vegan wedding to gentiles complaining about the lack of pork and shellfish at a kosher wedding. That’s not a fair comparison because the kosher wedding can still have chicken, fish, lamb or beef. Going without pork for a celebratory meal is not the same as going without meat all together. Sorry tempeh, tofu, TVP and seitan, but meat is tastier and more satisfying. 

On the other hand, vegans think meat is slavery! Yet meat eaters want vegans to cater to their immoral craving for dead animal chunks? Would you expect abolitionists getting married in the pre-Civil War South to have a few slaves working the reception just to appease their demanding racist relatives? Of course it’s an outrageous comparison, but that’s how many ethical vegans see it (your eyes can open to some truly offensive comparisons once you accept anti-speciesist logic). What upset meat eating guests at vegan weddings need to understand is that vegans think meat is evil. Not all of them would put it that way, but at the very least most vegans would classify meat as “very bad.” Why should they taint their joyous occasion because you think lasagna tastes better with a layer of ground up sentient beings? 

Ethical vegans are morally opposed to contributing to the death of animals. If they have a wedding and serve meat, well, they’re as blood-drenched as Carrie on prom night. Now that I think about it, I’d feel kind of bad if I went to a wedding between two vegans and there was meat. No doubt I’d eat it, but I wouldn’t like that the bride and groom were probably feeling like they’d let the animals down on their big day.   

Vegans rightly point out that it’s only one damn meal without meat. But then that logic backfires when meat eaters choose not to have a vegetarian option at their wedding. Except for vegans it’s worse, since that means one damn meal without food at all. Granted, in both scenarios it’s the vegans causing trouble in some way (to themselves in the case of the omnivore wedding and to omnivores in the case of their vegan wedding). So in a sense it’s always the vegans’ fault. 

Plus the “only one meal” argument does downplay how dreadful weddings can be if you have nothing to look forward to at the reception. Nobody really cares that two people are promising to stay together forever. Okay, if it’s your close friends or family members you do. But for many of the guests, weddings are nothing without food and alcohol. As the wedding approaches, they’re mostly thinking about gorging themselves and getting drunk. I know there are exceptions because I am one, but come on. Bad food is much worse at wedding.

Still. When vegans are getting married, you’ve got to let their morals come first. 

The last wedding I went to was a vegan wedding. I expected this because the two people getting married were vegan. However, they never at any point said “all the food would be vegan.” There was no talk of food at all beforehand. My guess was that it would be vegan, but I couldn’t be sure that their parents hadn’t pulled a meaty coup.

I was excited about the wedding no matter what, but the slight hope that there might be meat made me look forward to it even more. It was only once I got into the buffet line that I learned corpses hadn’t made the cut. I was disappointed, but there was a decent salad and I got full enough. It was about half an hour of meatless eating and then it was time to dance. 

The worst thing about a vegan wedding for meat eaters is all the time spent anticipating a lackluster meal. So vegans, keep your weddings vegan. Just don’t tell us beforehand. 

--Tagged under: Vegan Food--

--Tagged under: Purity--

--Tagged under: Alienation--

Yummy Vegan Yumminess (abridged)

Vegans like to use the word “yummy.” Though “yummy” hasn’t entered the vegan lexicon as something unique to animal-free living (the way that “compassionate” has), per capita they use it more than anybody else. My guess is that it’s to make vegan food sound more palatable than it actually is, but who knows, it could be any number of reasons, all of which would say something negative about veganism.

Here are a few search phrases to show you what I mean.

“Vegan and yummy” gets 677,000 results. “Yummy and vegan” gets 666,000 results, suggesting it’s slightly more popular to emphasize the veganness before the yumminess.

“Yummy in my vegan tummy,” alas, only gets 44.

A search for “yummy” by itself brings up 25,500,000 results. Add “vegan” to the search and you decrease that by a little over half: 12,000,000 results.

“Yummy food” gets 574,000 results. “Yummy vegan food” gets more than half that, 322,000 results.

That’s impressive considering vegans hover around one percent of the population. And some searches are even closer than that.

“Yummy cupcakes”: 85,400 results; “Yummy vegan cupcakes”: 70,600 results.

“Yummy breakfast”: 79,600 results; “Yummy vegan breakfast”: 63,900 results.

“Yummy restaurant”: 61,100 results; “Yummy vegan restaurant”: 58,700 results.

“Yummy cookies”: 47,400 results; “Yummy vegan cookies:” 44,000 results.

“Yummy pies”: 19,500 results; “Yummy vegan pies”: 12,300 results.

And sometimes the vegan version of a yummy search brings back even more results than its cruel counterpart.

“Yummy meat”: 56,300 results; “Yummy veggie”: 102,000 results.

“Yummy burger”: 38,300 results; “Yummy veggie burger”: 62,800 results. 

“Yummy baking”: 19,700 results; “Yummy vegan baking”: 36,000 results.

“Yummy cruelty” (-free): 9 results; “Cruelty-free yum”: 997 results.

“Yummy meaty goodness”: 852 results; “Yummy vegan goodness”: 6,740 results

Quite a few vegan blogs even have “Yum” or “Yummy” in their names: Yummy Vegan Dinners, Vegan YumYum, Yummy Vegan, The Yummy Vegan, Yummy Cookbook and Vegan Yummy are a couple of examples. There’s also Yummy Vegetarian Recipes and Yummy Diet Food, but those sometimes include dairy.

Speaking of vegetarians, they use “yummy” less often than vegans in total, even though there are more of them. “Yummy vegetarian” gets 93,300 results while “yummy vegan” gets 131,000.

I could go on. In fact, I originally did. But it was so tedious that it was the final straw for one (valued, as they all are) reader who promptly unsubscribed from this blog. So I’ll cut it off right here. The point is, vegans say “yummy” too damn much. If you don’t believe me, just re-read this entry.

--Tagged under: Vegan Food--

--Tagged under: Vegan Cliches--

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.

--Tagged under: Vegan Food--

Suicide Food is an entertaining look at restaurant ads and logos featuring animals who happily offer themselves up for human consumption. It’s nice to think animals like it when we kill and eat them, and these ads play to that guilt-free fantasy. 

But Ben, the creator of Suicide Food, seems unaware of an even more ridiculous spin-off trend: depictions of vegetables who want us to eat them. As unlikely as it is for a pig to voluntarily cut off her belly and serve it to us with a smile, with the proper training that might at least be possible. (Pigs can learn to play video games, so why not butchery?) Vegetables are just too dumb and too selfish for that.

Yet cellulose dealers would have us believe that the rotting plant corpses on our plate have consented to being there. Vegetables, they cleverly imply, actually get off on our nibbling. In other words, who cares if plants feel pain and have an interest in living? They are Suicide Veggies!

Picture 1

Or to make it even simpler, eat the vegetables that drink your milk.

Suicide Quorn

“You want to peel off my husk, boil me, poke metal prongs in my sides, chew up my kernels and throw my cob in the garbage? Aww, shucks!” 

Suicide Garlic

I would feel pretty damn majestic too if I were swimming in a pool of my own liquified remains. Wouldn’t you?  

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“Because if you don’t, we have to stay trapped in this overcrowded pod forever. You know… alive.”

Suicide Potato

And I don’t think Potato Pete is referring to his cooking skills. 

Suicide Apple

“A me a day keeps the doctor away, heh heh.” 

Suicide Tofu

If you’re going to play that way, neither does sausage. 

Suicide Raisins

“Oh I’m just about to lose my life, honey honey yeah.”

Suicide Carrots

These sexy, beta carotene-rich roots are good for the eyes in more ways than one! 

Mr. Peanut

“Sometimes you feel like a nut and sometimes you don’t. Either way, please kill me.”

--Tagged under: Vegan Food--

Which Milk Replacement is Best?

Everyone’s favorite nutrition diva Monica Reinagel has addressed a key question for vegans: should they drink soy milk, rice milk, hemp milk, oat milk or almond milk?

When I was vegan, I had trouble choosing. For a while I went with the default of unsweetened soy milk, until I decided to cut back on my unfermented soy. I switched over to rice milk, which tasted sweet and delicious without added sugar, but that was because it was so sugary on its own. It also didn’t provide much in the way of nutrients.

I tried hemp milk a couple of times but never got that into it, I think because it was hard to find unsweetened hemp milk at that time. I never bothered too much with oat milk; if I was going to use a fake milk, it would often be for oats, so that would have been redundant, like using puffin milk on Puffin cereal.

I was a huge fan of quinoa milk, mainly because I liked the idea of it. I bought way too much of it when I was in Prague and the vegetarian grocery store Country Life had it on sale. But I never saw it anywhere else.

I eventually settled on almond milk as the best milk replacement. It tasted good without having any obvious flaws like a lot of calories from sugar.

Was I right?

Monica refuses to single one out as objectively the best (she does say rice milk is objectively the worst), but she seems to favor soy and hemp milk, with almond milk being a strong contender.

I wonder if drinking hemp milk instead of almond milk would have saved my veganism.

--Tagged under: Health--

--Tagged under: Vegan Food--

--Tagged under: When I Was Vegan--

Cornucopia Institute Kind of Stretching it in MJ Interview

Journalist Kiera Butler followed up on her Mother Jones piece about hexane in isolated soy protein by interviewing Charlotte Vallaeys from the Cornucopia Institute (the group warning us about this neurotoxin used in the processing of fake meat and other fake protein products). Most of Butler’s questions regarding how dangerous hexane extraction really is were plucked straight out of the comments to her first article. See? Commenters can make a difference.

In case you can’t be bothered to read the interview, I’ll summarize: Vallaeys doesn’t come across as very convincing.

Here’s a sample question and answer:

Mother Jones: Hexane’s boiling point is well below grilling temperature (69C, about 157F). That’s cooler than even a toaster. Is there any evidence that the slightest bit remains in a veggie burger?

Vallaeys: The evaporation argument is often used by the companies that make these products. But what happens to the food when you cook it with this neurotoxic compound? Does it react with other substances and create new compounds before it evaporates? That really has not been studied. We think there should be more testing done on what these substances do to the food.

Butler also cites a study in which chickens were fed tons of hexane and barely seemed to notice. Vallaeys wriggles out of all this by saying that the environmental pollution from the hexane extraction is the worst part.

Um, Vallaeys, do you think we would be eating non-organic textured vegetable protein burgers if we gave a damn about the environment?

--Tagged under: Health--

--Tagged under: Vegan Food--

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