If you didn’t catch the New York Times article of March 11, 2012, then you didn’t catch the latest news about “fake chicken.” In October, NYT writer Mark Bittman visited a place in The Hague called The Vegetarian Butcher where he was treated to a chicken substitute he found palatable. “The plant-based products were actually pretty good — the chicken would have fooled me if I hadn’t known what it was…” He goes on to say, “the vegetarian meat I ate in The Hague isn’t widely distributed, but Quorn, a mushroom-based product can be pretty appealing in some instances…” He claims he hasn’t in the past been fooled in taste tests using different kinds of “fake” chicken and that Whole Foods will be using some of these products soon.
Kathy Freston, author of “Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World” says, “people can enjoy a healthier, better version of their traditional favorites. And if you know that food won’t hurt your body or the environment, and it didn’t cause any suffering to an animal, why wouldn’t you choose it?”
Bittman goes on to remind us: “This country goes through a lot of chickens: We raise and kill nearly eight billion a year — about 40 percent of our meat consumption. Chickens are grown so quickly that The Veterinary Record has said most have bone disease, and many live in chronic pain. (The University of Arkansas reports that if humans grew as fast as chickens, we’d weigh 349 pounds by our second birthday.)
Not to mention the amount of chicken waste produced and our difficulty dealing with it, and the antibiotic issue, how “roughly 80 percent of the antibiotics sold in this country are given to animals.” He goes on to remind us that it has produced a number of antibiotic-resistant diseases as well as increased the amount of arsenic in the soil and water, not to mention the safety issues for people working in those plants.
But are we convinced? I think we could be, maybe. But it’s also about cost. Some fake meat sells for as much as $12 a pound and up. So if they can get the cost down and the taste is really, really convincing, well, maybe…
