As I sit here at lunch, dutifully consuming my homemade channa masala, brown rice and spinach salad … and lamb curry … I stumble across a description of a bacon chocolate bar.
Seriously? You can do that?
Hm.
I think I want one. Just one. Or, just a taste. A teeny tiny little taste … just to see …
There is a burgeoning market these days for meat substitutes. Fake meat. Meat-like products that don’t involve killing anything that breathes.
I’m good with that. Lord knows I’ve dated enough vegetarians to have tried my share of fake meat. Some brands I even quite like. Morningstar breakfast patties rock, except I can’t find them in any stores in Toronto, for some reason. St. Yves makes a very tolerable fake ground beef. Yet, it is all pretty pricey and shockingly high in sodium.
I’ve tried my hand at making my own fake meat and it was a resounding success. Very yummy.
But, I gotta say … most of the meat substitutes don’t actually taste like meat. And, I think I’ve figured out why.
I think it would be a reasonable to assert that the majority of employees who work for companies that produce meat-like products are themselves vegetarian. Si? So, when you buy a product labelled “Canadian Veggie Bacon”, how do the people who are producing the product actually know what Canadian “real” bacon tastes like?
I would assert that they don’t. Esp. if the “Canadian Veggie Bacon” that I have in my fridge is any indication. It does not taste like bacon. It does not taste like … anything. And, when you think about it, if a bunch of vegetarians are in charge of making something that tastes like meat but is not meat … isn’t this a bit …. problematic? 😉