11–20 of 51 posts
It we ate real meat once or twice a month, we wouldn’t need this shit.
> real meat Keep in mind that many people have ethical issues with killing animals for food. They can certainly switch to eating plants, but many won't. "fake meat" is the bridge they need to align their actions with their morals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure I would want to eat chicken that costs only £2.50 a kilo. But again, if one ate chicken once a month, one could afford the real thing, and if most of us did the same, there would enough to go around without having to resort to industrial meat production.
90% of the Tesco chicken is that same meat. The packs with the skinned breasts cost (much) more than bone-in, skin-on legs, but they come from the same chickens. There's a tiny (like half a chiller's worth, relative to nearly a whole aisle) amount of "nice" chicken, which is where I would intuitively expect a chicken's cost to be: about £10-15 a bird. And this's exactly my point. People won't eat something like tofu…
Is “environmentap” a word? The world, it moves so fast.
Is “environmentap” a word? The world, it moves so fast.
It we ate real meat once or twice a month, we wouldn’t need this shit.
I mean technically you don't need any meat. There are plenty vegetarians doing just fine. But in any case I would always prefer something natural. I.e. not fake meat and not lab grown meat.
There are alternatives to meat, like bugs, but that is not what vegetarians do or preach.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
90% of the Tesco chicken is that same meat. The packs with the skinned breasts cost (much) more than bone-in, skin-on legs, but they come from the same chickens. There's a tiny (like half a chiller's worth, relative to nearly a whole aisle) amount of "nice" chicken, which is where I would intuitively expect a chicken's cost to be: about £10-15 a bird. And this's exactly my point. People won't eat something like tofu…
What's so hard about cooking tofu? I've never researched it and just fry it, seems to work fine. What techniques are you referring to?
Just whacking tofu solo into a pan and making it hot doesn't produce a result that I'd expect most people to go "yes, wow, you know, this is worth 3 times the cost of the chicken legs".
For a start, if you buy the Western supermarket stuff, it's often very spongy and you need to remove the water if you want to pan fry it. The Chinese supermarket stuff is much more homogeneous (you can make it spongy by freezing it if you want). So now you need to figure out that if you want it to go crispy, you need to press it. And maybe a cornflour dredge to make a nicer crust.
Frying directly also doesn't really work trivially with anything except extra-firm, it just turns into a scrambled mess (ok, so this one is cultural, in Chinese cooking you're generally supposed to maintain the shape). You can steam softer tofu, but then you still need to figure out how you like the sauce. You must also find a steamer big enough to fit the plate: attempting to extract tofu not on a plate from a steamer to a plate is a valuable and emotional learning experience on its own.
In general, tofu doesn't act the same way as meat: meat provides flavour to the dish, tofu absorbs flavours from the dish (and even this varies hugely between types). So if you just do a straight swap, even disregarding the mechanical differences, you will not get a very exciting result. So now you also need to adapt what you cook to fit tofu--this is often hard and you will fail if you're expecting to be able to make a roast tofu block taste like granny's roast chicken--or find new dishes that you like which use tofu.
Not to mention that for some dishes you may well need new ingredients that, as "world foods", are expensive or unavailable in normal supermarkets.
This all takes time, effort and not a little tofu to figure out. In the same way that my grandmother took a lot of chickens to hit on her signature!
Tofu is just an example. The same, broadly, goes for the other similar "alternatives" (in the Western-meat-avoider sense, they're just "food" to some): tempeh, seitan, paneer, gluten, whatever. Even fairly conventional "Western" things like halloumi and beans aren't simple drop-in replacements!
It we ate real meat once or twice a month, we wouldn’t need this shit.
this does not gel well with the idea of having luxuries constantly - a thing that has been more and more prevalent as time gone by. People expect it now, and not being able to eat meat is a sign of poverty (when it isn't really for a long time in history).