Fake Meat
By As a man trying to raise his child as a vegetarian, David Sirota dislikes fake meat products:
…the next time you go shopping, imagine what a kid gleans from veggie burgers, veggie bacon, veggie sausage patties, veggie hot dogs, Tofurky and all the other similar fare that defines a modern plant-based diet. While none of it contains meat, it is all marketed as emulating meat. In advertising terms, that’s the “unique selling proposition” — to give you the epicurean benefits of meat without any of meat’s downsides.
Obviously, this isn’t some conspiracy whereby powerful meat companies are deliberately trying to bring vegetarians into the megachurch of flesh eaters. If anything, it’s the opposite: It’s the vegetarian industry selling itself to meat eaters by suggesting that its products aren’t actually all that different from meat. The problem is how that message, like so many others in American culture, reinforces the wrongheaded notion that our diet should be fundamentally based on meat.
This is mostly right, but assumes vegetarians are as ideological about it as Sirota. Most vegetarians are former meat-eaters, not children raised as vegetarians. Sirota is right about the marketing campaign surrounding meat and how hard it is to break the habit of eating meat. It is to these people that the fake meat products are targeted. And I have no real problem with this–if eating Tofurky means eating less animals, that’s a good thing. The vegetarian industry of course is selling its products in the way he describes. But a lot of vegetarians aren’t doing this solely for ideological reasons, as Sirota is. Some people do it for health. Others, and I was this way in the many years I was a vegetarian, did it for sort-of ideological reasons. I mean, I knew that eating meat was bad for the environment, but like meat eaters with their diets, I didn’t think about that much. It wasn’t that central to my life.
I’m no longer really a vegetarian, although I never cook meat so I really don’t eat that much of it. I’ve definitely eaten my share of fake meat products. The problem with them, and why I rarely eat them anymore, is that they aren’t good food. They are overly processed, often fairly tasteless, and very high in sodium. They are for the lazy, the stressed, and the overworked. In other words, they are the non-meat versions of pre-made hamburger patties and TV dinners. There are many reasons people eat this way, some understandable, some less so. But this helps explain why they are appealing for a lot of vegetarians. Just because you choose to not eat meat doesn’t mean you are suddenly going to spend tons of time in the kitchen, live in food-ideologically pure life, or worry that much about your health. Eating veggie hot dogs with cans of non-meat chili is very appealing for a lot of people who don’t want to kill animals.