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Just a little thing

Some bird’s waffling along in The Guardian about vegan cheese. At which point, why?

We don’t mess with cheese to make it taste like tofu. So why mess with tofu to make it look like cheese?

Sure, vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, whatever. But why not enjoy each food for what it is? Why the replicas?

Well, other than an admission that tofu is disgusting that is.

21 thoughts on “Just a little thing”

  1. A chap with whom I worked, Indian Brahmin – very religious – was not allowed to eat cheese and onion crisps because they contained rennet.

  2. “But why not enjoy each food for what it is? Why the replicas?”

    I think it’s the modern equivalent of a medieval monk’s hair shirt: “I crave X, but I mustn’t eat X because it is sinful. Therefore I shall punish my sinful cravings by eating ersatz X that tastes vaguely like X but is utter crap.”

  3. Everywhere seems to offer a vegan / vegetarian / meat-free option on their menus, but how many vegan /vegetarian restaurants offer a ‘meat-full’ option?

  4. The fake cheese, fake meat, and fake milk are a nightmare if you have allergies. Vegan cheese often contains cashew – which would kill our son. The hippies who use vegan cheese want to trick you into trying it so they can make some weird point that you can’t tell the difference (you can).

    For customer choice reasons I am a big fan of not allowing the fakes to use the terms cheese, meat ,etc.

  5. The hippies who use vegan cheese want to trick you into trying it so they can make some weird point that you can’t tell the difference (you can).

    Subway were doing this with their meat-free meatballs a while back. As we were sitting eating out meaty Subs they wandered around the restaurant offering a free meat(free)ball. No one was playing though. I’ve tried meat free meat and it tastes nothing like meat and is awful.

  6. Vegan cheese is rarely made from tofu, because tofu is more expensive than cheese. The base is a highly-saturated plant oil such as coconut, which is then emulsified to give a cheese-like consistency. Essentially it’s cheese analog just made with plant fats instead of milk fats.

    Much like analog, it doesn’t really taste of anything until you flavour it to taste like cheese. Unlike analog, you need to make your own cheese flavour and can’t just mix it with 30% cheddar.

  7. Bloke in North Korea (Germany province)

    It’s because, as one of my greenie frends has been spouting for decades “once you can grow a burger in the lab you don’t need to farm animals any more because you can have a lab-grown burger just like a real burger”.

    Yes, the degree of ignorance combined with totalitarian thinking in an otherwise intelligent and generally rational person.

    YOU VILL EAT ZE BUGS!!!!!

  8. For people who are against meat eating, vegans are certainly obsessed with making their food look and sound like meat. Perhaps it is a mental disorder.

    Metal eaters don’t demand lamb carrots, or steak parsnips.

  9. “Perhaps it is a mental disorder.” I wonder why two food-based mental disorders – veganism and anorexia – have flourished over the same decades. Dunno. Are they both mainly female things?

  10. Wild guess: respectable young women no longer have babies – they wait for years and years. So when they are of prime baby-bearing age they have no babes to love. So they turn to loving themselves obsessively and, for the more bonkers-vulnerable, they adopt diet fads.

  11. Add in the fact that it is almost entirely impossible to be a true vegan in modern society. Pretty much everything has some animal products in it somewhere: tyres, vaccines, conditioners, et cetera

  12. Pretty much everything has some animal products in it somewhere: tyres, vaccines, conditioners, et cetera

    Plastic tenners, and hilariously, toothbrushes…

  13. If you believe, as vegans do, that it is ethically wrong to exploit an animal without its consent and that it is incapable of giving consent, then it seems perfectly reasonable to still want the experience of eating cheese without the animals suffering part.

    It’s like how we replaced gladiators with action movies, you still get to watch people kill each other without the “people actually dying” part.

    Animals taste good to eat. Killing animals to eat them is morally wrong. These are their premises, you do not have to agree with them, but if you want argue with them, then it is useful to know whether their premises are wrong or their logic is wrong.

    So creating fake meat that tastes as good as real meat but doesn’t require killing animals is the ideal solution. The problem is that it doesn’t actually taste as good (and people who haven’t eaten meat in a long time have forgotten how good it tastes and think their substitutes actually are as good). But they are definitely better than they were – a Beyond Burger or an Impossible Burger is better than a McDonald’s burger, which was not true for a Linda McCartney veggieburger 25 years ago. A good burger (not a great one, just a good one, something like GBK or Byron) is still better than the fakes. But they are getting better and they might eventually catch up completely.

    Are there vegetarians who just don’t like meat much? Yes, of course there are, and they tend to be the ones who don’t bother with the fake meat (or cheese or whatever).

  14. Ah, meat-eaters. Full of their cretinous contradictions. Such as “That shite tastes nothing like bacon”, usually expressed at about the same time as “Why do you want something that tastes like bacon?”

    If you aren’t going to eat it and I am, frankly, my dear, that’s none of your fucking business.

  15. Recusant and BiW: “Pretty much everything has some animal products in it somewhere: tyres, vaccines, conditioners, et cetera” …… One exception being, I am sure, Doner kebab.

  16. Beyond Burger or an Impossible Burger is better than a McDonald’s burger Nope. They are both absolute gash and far worse than a Maccy Ds basic hamburger.

    It is only possible to be a ‘proper’ vegan due to supplements. Asian followers of vegan (or similar) diets only survived because the vagaries of their food supply meant their diets weren’t actually vegan.

    I am reluctant to pathologise the religious practices of Jains etc, but western veganism is basically a mental illness. As is a significant proportion of all Western culture.

    A mate of mine has two daughters. D1 has been vegan since she was early/mid teens. She is the best part of six inches shorter than her younger sister.

  17. Tofu’s actually pretty good in a good Vietnamese restaurant. Try the Hanoi Bike Shop if you’re in or near Glasgow. Hell of an eating experience.

  18. @aadolff
    …… One exception being, I am sure, Doner kebab.

    It has meat alright, just not from any domesticated species.

  19. “…… One exception being, I am sure, Doner kebab.”

    Like a Dibbler Special, it is made from a named animal. One might hope it wasn’t “Spot”..

    As for veganism… It’s not as much a mental, as it is a social disease.
    Afaik vegans are all City Folk who are at least three levels removed from the nitty-gritty of actually producing food, and all it entails. Including the killing bit..

  20. What vegans and veggies fail to realise is that for any organism to live, something else must die. Your lettuce may not squeal or wriggle when you pull it from the earth, but it still dies so that you may live.

  21. And in order to grow edible veg, you need to kill (directly or indirectly) lots of pest creatures, though the killing may be done more (or less) ‘organically’.

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