Would it not be wonderful if that delicious steak you were devouring was made from plants, rather than that beautiful black and white moo-cow? This is the stuff out of the movies. Picture a cow in a field of daisies, batting its eyelashes at you. Now picture that cow cut into tiny little pieces and slapped onto your plate.
Yes, some of you would say that I am being dramatic. I get that.
I also get that meat is just a convenient way of getting a lot of minerals, vitamins, fats and stuff all in one place. But, surely you can replace all these nutrients by combining veggies and fruit, and get them to taste like real meat?
Reasons to go Artificial
There are quite a few reasons why there should be a concerted effort to find new ways of getting our meat (or should I say, substitutes for meat):
- Those fluffy little bunnies could live and pay off their mortgages without worrying about being sliced and diced and eaten;
- Raising livestock is incredibly inefficient and expensive. It requires a lot of land, a lot of water and a lot of energy to process;
- Humans only use a third of the animal as meat. Most of the rest is thrown away;
- Animals tend to pass wind (a lot). Plants don’t tend to pass any wind that I know of. We could save our planet from global warming and save our sanity by not having to listen to so many groups winging about it;
- We could have forests and fields and daisies that are not ruined by having ten billion cows and sheep and goats eating stuff;
- We could have farms which produce plants which would in turn encourage the bees to come back. If bees disappear completely, humans will disappear too, as you know.
That would be a good plan, but there are a few hiccups:
- In order to achieve the taste of “real” meat, the plant has to have all kinds of colorants and flavourants added. That kinda defeats the purpose;
- You have to blend quite a few different types of veggies and fruit to get the nutrients of meat;
- Some manufacturers have gone so far as to grow fungus, flavour it and try to pass that off as some sort of nourishment. Talk about processed.
- The whole point is to get away from processing food / meat. Combining rabbit food with squirrel food and then adding salt and spices is not quite right.
- The stuff tastes like cardboard, processed cardboard.
- Some of them are made with Soy. The only problem with that is most soy is that it is genetically modified, and you know what they say about that.
- The stuff is cooked and apparently it needs to be cooked for hours to get a specific texture that is similar to meat. Cooked stuff takes all the nutrients out.
- An isolate like pea isolate may have some semblance of protein and may be fortified with iron and stuff, but how well can the body process that hunk of junk.
My question is: Why not just eat the original plant and get used to the taste, rather than trying to imitate an animal meat taste. Try a berry smoothie sometime.
And besides, eating artificial meat is like comparing a genuine Michael Kors bag to a Chinese knock-off of a Michael Kors bag.
David Owen Nunes
David is many faceted, fascinating, fastidious, fair, fabulous and the other F word. He works in the Pensions Industry, plays occasional golf, and dreams of being able to write full time.
