The Irony Thread

Yeah, I do find the whole video camera warrior thing a bit odd. I was watching a documentary about the Met a few months back and they were called to a fast food restaurant with reports of someone carrying a knife. They arrived in numbers and approached the man that had been pointed out to do a search but were immediately surrounded by pretty much every customer in there filming and then moaning about over-reaction when it turned out the guy didn't have a knife. Then you get the ones whose first instinct at a car crash or similar is to film instead of help.

Humza Yousaf receiving more complaints under Scotland's new hate crime law than J.K. Rowling 🙂

😄

If it is collaboration, surely it would have been better for them to hold it in France?

In the absence of a 'lazy, blonde, washed-up thickos' thread, I'd put the story in the cheering up thread, as it proved what we already knew.

That's the bit I find a bit weird about some vegetarianism - trying to replicate the sensation of meat but in vegetable form... it suggests that there's a inner craving for something about the meat experience... it's not as if vegetables don't have interesting textures of their own, so I dont really understand the refashioning them into sausages and burgers.

No, I don't think so, as even when minced, meat still retains its 'meat texture', and its characteristic 'resistance' (for want of a better word). It's not trying to be something other than meat. If someone was trying to make dead animal flesh look & taste like carrots or broccoli, you'd have a point.

Pâté doesn't have much "resistance". Why is meat pretending to be something else?

My Mrs is vegan. As there's only two of us in the house, weekday meals are usually vegan and we both actively avoid the processed vegetable "meat substitutes" as they are, by and large, terrible.

Having spent 20 years in the meat industry, I can honestly say that I was very surprised at how good properly made vegan food (i.e. that cooked at home) can be and I am amazed at the lack of creativity in even dedicated vegan restaurants. I honestly can't think of any that do stuff as good as we make at home

Plant based food is a fast developing market. You really have to have your finger on the pulse.

Many of the meat replacements are plant based protein, pulses, beans, legumes and I think Quorn is mycoprotein (fungal). They are there to fill the protein part of a meal that’s missing without meat. Personally, I sometimes eat Linda McCartney sausages and vegan mince, neither of which are unhealthy or unpalatable, but a (vegan) whole foods approach is what works best for me. Some of these meat replacements are ridiculously overprocessed (bacon) and are far removed from a purer vegan/veg diet. An omnivore, vegan or vegetarian diet could be as healthy or unhealthy, as you make it.

On the taste front, for me nothing replaces the unctuousness of meat, but that’s a small sacrifice as it’s the single biggest way to mitigate carbon emission (apart from suicide). To have any chance of feeding the predicted 10.5 billion and still have a planet that’s worth living on, something's got to change with our diet and the livestock industry.

‘Global grazing land with the amount of cropland used for animal feed, livestock accounts for 80% of agricultural land use. The vast majority of the world’s agricultural land is used to raise livestock for meat and dairy.’

I had the misfortune of having to eat at a hipster vegan restaurant on a work meal. I quite enjoy a vegan bean burger and quite often choose it in from a standard menu so went for it in this place where it came with ‘cheese’ and ‘bacon’. I’m not a fussy eater at all but even before I took a bite the smell was putting me off, I took the first bite and it was rank. I stuck with it hoping it would become an acquired taste but ended up leaving at least half of it.

I’m not a huge meat eater, I’ve only ever had steak on a few occasions and if there are meat dishes I tend to go for chicken. There are so many ways to have a plant based diet without that sort of rubbish, J assume it has come about as so many people say they’d like to go vegetarian but couldn’t go without bacon so companies have tried to cash in with something that vaguely looks like bacon but smells and tastes disgusting. To be honest I’d be more than happy eating something like a Sunday roast without meat or a vegetable curry as I love veg and there’s no need for making it into some highly processed product.

Surely it was a joke about pulses

Absolutely fine - no arguments about their personal choices. My observations aren't about vegetarianism or veganism, but about the apparent hankering after meat-type textures, when vegetables, fungi and pulses have such a wide variety which can be enjoyed in their own right.