Monday, September 08, 2008

audio blog: vegetarian hypocrisy?

^ Altogether now. 1...2...3... WTF?!! I snapped this picture at Trader Joe's the other day. Hmm, I should pick up a package of Tofurkey or Beef-less Strips just out of curiosity.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I bought Beef-less Strips the other day. I'll let you know how they are. :)

Wormsie said...

I can sort of understand what you mean. I know many people who turn vegetarian first try to imitate foods that contain mean, and only gradually learn to cook delicious, nutritious vegetarian food.

However, think of falafel, for example: it looks like meatballs, but it's not its fault! :) And if one has never seend a tofu cube, it might look like meat as well. There's also a food called seitan, which looks like a steak, but is compltely vegetarian. Even it's not possible to tell the difference between a vegetarian loaf and a meetloaf before tasting it, it doesn't necessarily mean that the vegetarian loaf is an imitation. (I think this has something to do with people's way of thinking of being an omnivore as the norm and being a vegetarian as being against the norms -> therefore, vegetarians imitate.)

The problem stems from the fact that vegetarians need protein, and in order to get all the amino acids, your choice of food as a vegetarian becomes more limited: either you try to combine diferent food sources to get everything you need, or, more simply, get one product that has all the necessary amino acids in one. Meat, egg and dairy products contain all of the necessary amino acids, but they are out of the question (well, for vegans at least), so you are left with soy protein and a few slightly more obscure sources such as quinoa. And if you want to make something edible out of soy protein, it ends up looking like meat slices or minced meat... I don't think there's a lot you can do about it.

However, calling the end result tofurkey is just... bizarre. Probably a marketing tactic to get non-vegetarians interested in vegetarian food.

I'm an omnivore, but one day it just dawned on me that eating meat every day isn't probably the way I want to live the rest of my life. Reason number one: meat should be more expensive when taken into account the bad conditions the animals are brought up in before slaughtered. Reason number two: meat should be more expensive because of the impact meat production has on the climate. Reason number three: you don't really need to eat meat every day, and there are lots of delicious vegetarian foods. That said, I personally believe that human beings need meat products, that's the only way to get vitamin B12 naturally, for example.