Daging Tiruan
Walk
into the average supermarket and you will now see a bizarre array of processed
vegan products that never used to be there – from pasties to imitation
“chorizo” sausages. Quorn – a fake meat made from mycoprotein – has been
sold in Britain since 1985, but only in the past few years has it started to be
sold in such a gallimaufry of versions, from vegetarian “ham” to nuggets, from
fake turkey and stuffing to steak and gravy pies.
In the chilled vegetarian aisle there are now plant-based “meatballs”,
“burgers” and “goujons”. You could wear your hands out making all the air
quotes required to cover these vegan “meats”. Quorn has also replaced the meat
versions of nuggets and hot dogs on many school dinner menus.
It’s not that the concept of imitation meat is anything new. For as long as
there have been vegetarians – or people too poor to buy meat – there have been
mock meats of one kind or another. For centuries in Russia cooks have made an
aubergine puree that goes by the name of “caviar”. Or consider the Welsh
Glamorgan sausage made from cheese, leeks and bread crumbs, which became
popular during the second world war when meat was rationed.
The difference with the new fake meats is that, thanks to developments in
food technology, many of them have become uncannily realistic in both texture
and appearance. All the major supermarkets are now pushing increasingly
plausible meat-free versions of animal proteins, from “flaky’” fish to burgers oozing with beetroot juice.
Advocates of the new fake meats such as the Beyond Burger – and its main
rival in the US, the Impossible Burger – claim they are a boon for the
environment and for human health. One of the founders of Impossible Foods, Dr
Patrick Brown, has said that his vision is to eliminate the inefficient and
cruel demand for animals as food. “We now know how to make meat better – by
making it directly from plants,” Brown has said. Indeed, for some consumers,
these fake meats are what they have long been craving – a sustainable answer to
our meat-obsessed food culture that simultaneously offers different flavours
and textures other than lentils and vegetables.
The existence of realistic fake meat products raises interesting questions
about what meat really is. When we say we love meat are we really talking about
a set of nutrients? A certain flavour or texture? Or a set of cultural memories
of shared meals such as Christmas turkey and Easter lamb? A culture that is
much more advanced along the fake meat route is China, where for centuries
Buddhist cooks have made ingenious “roast goose” and “duck” and even
“intestines” from layers of wheat gluten and tofu. Chinese food expert Fuchsia
Dunlop tells me that the “bleeding’ burgers” of modern-day Britain “have
the same purpose as Chinese Buddhist imitation meats”, of enabling people to
eat vegan food without making dramatic changes to their eating habits. The
difference, she notes, is that traditional Chinese fake meats tend to be made
from tofu, mushrooms and other ordinary ingredients, whereas some of the new
fake meats of the west “are manufactured with possibly unhealthy additives”.
And this is where the huge and ever-growing enthusiasm for fake meat becomes
somewhat tricky.
Concern for our health is one of the main reasons we are now buying
vegetarian sausages and burgers in such quantities, according to survey data.
The catch is that there is not necessarily anything particularly healthy about
a vegan hotdog. Many see them as just another set of overly processed
industrial foods in a world that is already awash with what food writer Michael
Pollan calls “food-like substances”.
Jenny Rosborough is a registered nutritionist who worries that vegan
“meats” are perceived as automatically being healthier. Rosborough points out
that meat-free burgers contain on average even more salt than meat burgers:
0.89g per serving as against 0.75g. Rosborough also notes that when switching
to these products you also need to consider what nutrients might then be
missing from your diet, such as iron and B vitamins.
“A vegan hotdog is probably no better for you than a meat one,” says Renee
McGregor, a registered dietitian who works with athletes and is the author of Training
Food. As a vegetarian, McGregor sometimes uses tofu sausages but feels
they do not deserve the “health halo effect” they sometimes get, just on
account of being vegan. “The key thing is that any food that has been highly
processed should be eaten mindfully – so not necessarily avoided completely,
but I wouldn’t recommend a vegan sausage weekly due to the high salt content
and most likely list of additives and preservatives,” says McGregor.
I started to question the healthiness of some of the new generation of
vegan burgers after I ate a Beyond Burger, as served at the Honest Burger
chain. While eating the burger – which came with guacamole and “pulled”
barbecued jackfruit – I was stunned by how close it felt to meat in my mouth,
with its rosy pink hue and fragile flesh-like texture. But it felt nothing like
meat to my digestive system.
Half an hour after lunch, I started to have griping stomach pains and a
horrible junk-food aftertaste. When I looked up the ingredients, it occurred to
me that had they not been marketed as quasi-meat I would never have chosen to
lunch on “pea protein isolate, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut
oil, water, yeast extract, maltodextrin, natural flavours, gum Arabic …”
Clearly not everyone reacts to the Beyond Burger this way. Plenty of vegans
will have enjoyed it without any ill-effects. But I can’t help feeling that the
novelty of these products means that their effects on human digestion are
relatively untested. Quorn products warn you on the packet that the mycoprotein
“may cause intolerance” in some people.
So can we actually say whether these fake meat products are healthier than
meat?
I consult Dr Fumiaki Imamura, an epidemiologist at the MRC Epidemiology
Unit in Cambridge.
He notes that there is “no evidence” from large-scale studies that specifically
looks at such products. He directed me to a Harvard study from 2016 which
suggested that people who ate more plant protein and less animal protein had
lower overall risk of death, but the plant protein in the study was mostly
beans, pulses and nuts rather than Quorn “bacon” strips.
Then again, maybe the consumers of fake meats do not expect them to be
particularly healthy, any more than I am prioritising health on those hurried
nights when I sling fish fingers in the oven for my children. My sister, who
lives in the US, is a big fan of frozen vegan nuggets of various kinds, but for
her they are mostly about convenience (and animal rights).
She is one of the busiest people I know and has three kids, two of whom are
vegetarian, as is she. If health were her only consideration, she would make
wholesome dinners of lentil dal or vegetable chilli. But her younger girls
won’t eat most cooked vegetables and she would find it exhausting to cook
different meals to suit their different preferences every night alongside
homework. “So I give them raw veg with whatever quick thing, and that’s often
vegan hotdog.”
Maybe the most pressing question raised by vegan fake meats is not why they
aren’t better or healthier, but why the meat that they are choosing to ape is
itself so highly processed and poor in quality.
Faced with the choice between a “regular” frankfurter and a vegan one, can
we really say which one is “real” and which is not? Herta, the leading brand of
pork frankfurters boasts that it is 74.5% pork. The rest of it includes wheat
fibre, pea protein and dextrose – the same kind of industrial ingredients you would
find in many fake meat products.
Back at DoppleGanger, Alfy Fowler tells me that he feels that the soy
patties he serves are more authentic in their way than most of what is consumed
as “meat” in modern Britain. In one of the bars where Fowler used to cook, they
served a bar snack of “chicken goujons”. He could see on the packet that these
goujons were only 50% chicken with the rest made up of wheat gluten and various
additives, yet the customers who bought them believed they were eating meat.
“Meat has become so cheap that it isn’t really meat any more,” Fowler observes.
Defenders of meat will say – with good reason – that an unprocessed
home-cooked grass-fed leg of lamb is a far more “natural” and nourishing thing
than a Quorn burger. But the question is what to do if you lack the cash for
grass-fed lamb.
In the developed countries of the world, including Britain, about half of
all meat consumed is now made up of processed meat products, from pork pies to
kebabs, because this is the kind of meat the average person can afford. If your
idea of “meat” is a nugget, I increasingly agree with my sister that it might
as well be a vegetarian one.
The bigger question is why we remain so hung up on this thing – “meat” as
the yardstick for our meals. Given that most meat is so highly processed and
cruelly produced, why do we still prize its flavours and textures?
The rise of fake meat is not yet a true food revolution because it leaves
our preferences untouched. The real change to our food culture will come the
day that someone designs a steak that tastes like a carrot.
Bee Wilson is the author of The
Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change, to be published
by Fourth Estate in March
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.