Easiest would be as mentioned fruit and cheese on picks (skewers), salsa and chips, apples with dip. I especially like a peanut butter dip for apples.Originally Posted by pinkytoe
Easiest would be as mentioned fruit and cheese on picks (skewers), salsa and chips, apples with dip. I especially like a peanut butter dip for apples.
I agree. The target market is people who want to feel good about eating a humane diet or a "healthy(?)" diet or want to impress their friends with how humane/healthy their food choices are, but they aren't committed enough to vegetarianism to actually give up the pleasure or familiarity of eating things that taste like meat or cheese.
I, on the other hand, would love to be fully vegetarian, but I've done that short term several times, and when a crisis comes along I've just got to have some meat and cheese comfort food to get me through it. So I long ago chose to be mostly vegetarian while remaining a partial/minimal carnivore. To thine own self be true and all that stuff.
i agree. Vegetarian meals are easy, and avoiding the salty soy burgers is even easier.I don't think committed long term vegetarians are the target market but some might be. And frankly though an omnivore I'm not the target market either, the type of people that going to a fast food place is anathema, are probably not the target market. And arguments: it's no more unhealthy than a regular burger at McDonalds/Burger King/In-and-Out just fly right over one's head. Uh my diet isn't perfect, but it's been decades since I've gone to a fast food place in the first place, so unless it was that or go Donner Party. AS for vegan cheese, I have eaten things like cashew cheese and cream though, pretty good actually. But of course I usually eat real cheese.
I have a country friend who runs a small butcher shop, mostly for big game during season, but also processing for small one or two pig or cow in the back type husbandry. I have helped process a few varieties of wild and domestic animal from beginning to end, and my take is that many or most omnivores would consider the sights, sounds, and smells of butchery an abomination, also. However, I'd also say as a mostly vegan, that fake meats and cheeses are no free ride on the health wagon. And there are a lot of other processed foods in the standard American diet that pretend to be something.
I don't try to make my personal choice of diet an issue in polite company and with some certain restraints will eat what is served as a guest in another's home. It's not that huge a deal every once in a while. On the other hand, my mother had Celiac disease, where eating wheat or gluten at a meal could be a very big deal.
"The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto" by Michael Pollan will answer that a lot better than I could.
No one wants to confront the messy smelly uncomfortable facts about how food, especially meat, ends up on your plate, and unlike previous generations, most of us don't have to because we have professional growers and butchers who get paid to do all that stuff safely out of our sight.
But, not to put to sharp a point on it, if we want to stay alive we have to eat something and as an omnivore we are free to choose from a wide range of foods, so why would we voluntarily consume manufactured food-like substances instead of real food? That is why the fake foods are an abomination.
The butcher shop is just an unpleasant fact of life that has always been with us for as long as humans have been capable of killing and eating other animals. Abominable it may be, but it only continues to exist because some people are willing to do that work and other people are eager to buy meat.
I would say abomination is in the eye of the beholder and not an absolute. In my eye the standard large scale industrial production of meat products is not only an abomination, but inhumane and bad for the environment. I'm uncertain in the difference between fake food and processed food.
Pollan has taken an interesting twist in his writing subject matter these days.
Of course it is. And I never said anything to the contrary. The point I made in my OP was that people who refuse to eat meat (or other animal products) for philosophical, religious, or social reasons are hypocrites if they substitute a fake manufactured product so they can feel like they're eating the prohibited substance without breaking their self-imposed food rule.
Fake food is a product that is eatable and looks, smells, or tastes like something it is not because it has been deliberately altered using chemicals or other methods to change it's molecular structure, it's smell, it's taste, or some combination thereof.
Processed food is real food that has been prepared in a more or less normal way for eating, but was processed on a large scale as a way for the processor to make money and for the convenience of the consumer.
The problem with modern processed food is that so much of it has been over-processed and stripped of a lot of it's nutritional properties and/or loaded with things no human would intentionally eat, simply because doing so makes the processing more profitable for the processor.
Hominy, for example, is corn treated with an alkali so it will puff up and be softer, that's a traditional way of preparing corn whether it's done in your kitchen or in a big processing plant. But high-fructose corn syrup is not in any way, shape, form, or sense of the word "natural" because it has been over-processed (or mis-processed if you prefer) to create a man-made product with a higher retail value than the corn it comes from.
Side Note: High fructose corn syrup is a liquid sweetener made from cornstarch by breaking down corn into molecules of glucose (a type of sugar) and chemically changing half of those glucose molecules into fructose (another type of sugar that is sweeter). In the process all or the fiber and nutritional value of the corn is stripped away, leaving only calories.
Baked Brie and sourdough bagette. Side plate of fruit.
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