Names have been omitted to protect the innocent.
A story was told to me recently (from a reliable source that is beyond reproach), that a vegetarian visited a local pub for a family lunch as a holiday treat. Said pub patron had been a vegetarian for almost thirty years, having converted in their early teens. They ordered a veggie burger. As it happens, a vegan was sitting on the next table and had ordered a vegan burger. As can sometimes happen during busy lunch hours, the orders were mixed up, and the vegetarian got landed with the vegan burger.
As the event was recounted to me, the vegetarian, upon taking a bite of the wrong burger, exclaimed “Oh my god, I think I’ve eaten meat…!”
And I can understand why this absolutely true story would happen. I have experienced many veggie options in my life, from tofu to the multifarious Quorn offerings, Beanfeast to nut roasts. In all that time, and among all of those options, I’ve never really come close to finding anything that came even someway close to matching the taste and ‘mouthfeel’ of meat. Some of them make decent meals, but even the most enjoyable are still obviously NOT meat. It’s only since I’ve been vegan that I’ve found products that do a genuinely good job of replicating beef burgers, or chicken pieces, or passable sausages.
Which I think is interesting.
I have extolled the virtues of Oumph! offerings in other posts; I think it is a great replacement for chicken in my cooking. But I would never offer it to my children. It’s TOO meat-like for them. They only know the intentionally processed Quorn chicken-style pieces, which are as close to meat as chicken crisps. They are all lifelong veggies though, never having tasted actual meat, so they wouldn’t panic at eating more ‘realistic’ vegan food. They just wouldn’t like it (picky little buggers).
However, for a decades-long vegetarian who started life eating meat but hasn’t tasted it since adolescence, I can well imagine that the vegan option would induce an existential taste panic.
For me, it’s just a positive reminder of how much closer we’re getting to making plant-based diets all that more accessible and attainable – even for the type of hard-core carnivore that I used to be.
