Vegetarian – More Zonkyness

Why Do Vegan Substitutes Look Like Meat?

Feb 162023

One of the things that keep cropping up whenever vegan food crops up in social media, is why does it always resemble meat? Or “faux meat” as I call it.

It doesn’t.

As a vegetarian of over 30 years (and thus aligned with vegans; even if I’m not a “good vegan”), I very rarely eat faux meat; and when I do it’s out of curiosity. Not to see how closely they resemble meat, but to see if they were a viable choice.

V* (meaning vegetarian and vegan) food doesn’t need a meat substitute. There’s plenty of fine choices out there that don’t miss the rotting corpses a bit.

So where does this belief come from? There’s three possible reasons why faux meat choices exist :-

New v*s miss certain meat dishes and seek faux meat to fill the gap in their diet. Fair enough.
Meat eaters who for one reason or another seek to swap out meat for a meat-free alternative. Fair enough.
Companies who market these products as being what v*s actually want. Whether they’re right or not kind of depends on how large groups 1&2 are.

Ducks swimming on water in a line. — Ducks In A Row

Who Is The Vegan Sausage Roll For?

General, Humour No Responses »

Jan 012020

The vegan sausage roll. What is it made of? Given the logic of naming meat products (“Pork sausage”, “Beef sausage”, “Turkey sausage”, …), you would kind of expect it to be made out of vegans. Sorry … that’s a joke I keep making because I find it funny.

But who is the vegan sausage roll (and all meat-free meat products) really for? I’m no vegan, but I have been a vegetarian for over 30 years, and I say the vegan sausage roll is not really for vegans at all.

It’s not bad, but the best part of it is the pastry wrapped around that faux-meat. The faux-meat is too much like meat to be something that a vegan or vegetarian hankers after (except those who are newly converted). I’ve also just tried an incredible burger, and the results were quite similar – the burger was impressively meat-like, but frankly a spicy-bean burger is nicer (for me).

No, this stuff is for those who hanker after meat but want to limit their meat intake. Which is no bad thing, but can we at least start naming these thing properly? Apart from anything else, it’ll stop me making really bad jokes about meat products consisting of vegans.

Two Bridges

Piers Morgan and the Vegan Sausage Roll

General No Responses »

Jan 032019

It seems Piers Morgan has got in all of a lather about vegan sausage rolls being introduced to a well known pastry shop :-

The funny thing is just how pathetic he is with this comment. Personally I’ve never been to a Greggs simply because the vegetarian selection was so rubbish (it’s been a while since I checked). So that’s one customer that Greggs have missed out on, although now I may pop in for a vegan bloody sausage roll just to annoy Piers (although I somehow doubt they’re actually bloody).

Piers is an example of the kind of person who shouldn’t be put in charge of a waste-paper basket never mind anything more important. He’s under the impression that his choices in life are what everyone should be doing, which can be very dangerous indeed.

Greggs are perfectly free to change their menu at will and offering choices to vegetarians and vegans seems a perfectly sensible thing to do. It increases their potential customer base, and frankly the only meat-eaters who complain are the kind of stodgy thinkers that Piers is.

After all Greggs isn’t going to stop stocking “real” sausage rolls whilst they still have plenty of customers buying them.

Veganism & The “Carrying Capacity” Of Different Diets

Media, Politics No Responses »

Mar 052017

There is an article being advertised around that uses a scientific report detailing the carrying capacity (how many people agriculture can support) of different diets. The article itself is titled in a way to bash vegans for not being as environmentally friendly as they claim to be. Which is odd because the scientific report does show that a vegan diet is more efficient (in terms of how many people can be fed) than a normal diet; it’s just not quite as efficient as some diets – specifically diets that make use of grazing land that cannot be otherwise used.

So a relatively mainstream article is bashing vegans because?

Well the usual reason is because of the holier than thou attitude of vegans. Actually it’s the militant fundamentalist wing of the vegans who do the whole holier than thou thing; just like an iceberg most of the vegan population isn’t visible.

Of course any reputable news organisation would know this, so only resorts to demonisation of vegans as click-bait. Obviously desperate.

The interesting thing about the report is that they have actually shown that different diets can be more efficient (in terms of the number of people that can be fed) than others, and that the average diet is probably one of the least efficient possible diets. Even more interesting (especially for the meat eaters out there) is that omnivorous diets (admittedly with significantly reduced meat intake) can be even more efficient than a vegan diet.

This is apparently due to the fact that a vegan diet will not make use of marginal grazing land which can only be used for raising meat.

If the doom-mongers are right about climate change and rising population, all those dedicated meat eaters out there should probably be encouraging vegans (and vegetarians) so when things get marginal, there are still a few animals to share out.

Are Humans Evolved To Eat Meat? Not so much!

General No Responses »

Dec 292016

As a vegetarian (who doesn’t intentionally go around prophesying) I often encounter the hackneyed old “but we’re evolved to eat meat”. The obvious response is that just because we’re evolved for a certain kind of behaviour does not mean we should necessarily follow it. And of course, it’s not true – we’re evolved to be omnivores not carnivores.

But here’s the thing: Eating certain forms of meat exclusively for a moderately extended period of time can cause death by what is effectively starvation. As a very rough rule of thumb, the wilder an animal is, the leaner its meat is likely to be. So any of our ancestors who ate nothing but meat were likely to be at best severely malnourished and likely to die young.

Of course our ancestors didn’t eat like that or we wouldn’t be here. They ate anything they could get their hands on – animals that didn’t run fast enough, proto-vegetables, grains, fruits, nuts. Anything that wasn’t poisonous.

We’re also evolved to eat more than we need. The idea is that we store fat in reserve for hard days ahead, but these days any “hard days” rarely involve lack of food. Another example of how we should be prepared to intelligently disregard evolved eating habits.

Does this mean we should all become vegetarian? No, of course not. There are plenty of reasons to stop eating meat, but this is not one. It may be a good reason to eat meat less frequently – have high quality meat three times a week rather than junk meat seven times a week.

The New Defence

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