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If you haven't heard of this, it's a new soy-based burger that supposedly cooks, looks, tastes, and feels exactly like a meat burger. I saw it at Fatburger, which I figured was a good place to try it -I already know I like their regular burgers so I have a good basis for comparison, and it's pretty cheap so if I hated it at least I wasn't out a tragic amount of money.
I asked the guy at the counter if people were liking it. With slight evasiveness, he said, "Yeah, lots of people are ordering it!"
If my experience was typical, I suspect that lots of people will not be ordering it twice.
On the one hand, it was by far the best non-meat burger I've ever had, and I ate almost the entire thing. (I was hungry.) However, it does not look like meat. It looks similar to meat. But it was visibly a veggie burger. I actually don't care much about appearance, but just sayin'. Similarly, the texture isn't quite right. It's close. But it has a noticeably vegetal soft homogeneity, which is different from that of ground meat. Most importantly, it doesn't taste quite like meat. Or rather, it doesn't taste like a Fatburger burger. It has a slight spiciness that I didn't care for, which is probably there to mask the non-meat flavors. If the texture and appearance had been perfect, I might have believed it as a meat burger that was overspiced to make up for the meat not being the best.
In short, disappointing. I would have preferred their real burger. I also would have preferred going home and making myself a salad. I keep hoping for a perfect meat substitute, but in the meantime I'll stick to eating less meat and mostly from identifiably good-practice sources.
Have any of you tried this? What did you think?
I asked the guy at the counter if people were liking it. With slight evasiveness, he said, "Yeah, lots of people are ordering it!"
If my experience was typical, I suspect that lots of people will not be ordering it twice.
On the one hand, it was by far the best non-meat burger I've ever had, and I ate almost the entire thing. (I was hungry.) However, it does not look like meat. It looks similar to meat. But it was visibly a veggie burger. I actually don't care much about appearance, but just sayin'. Similarly, the texture isn't quite right. It's close. But it has a noticeably vegetal soft homogeneity, which is different from that of ground meat. Most importantly, it doesn't taste quite like meat. Or rather, it doesn't taste like a Fatburger burger. It has a slight spiciness that I didn't care for, which is probably there to mask the non-meat flavors. If the texture and appearance had been perfect, I might have believed it as a meat burger that was overspiced to make up for the meat not being the best.
In short, disappointing. I would have preferred their real burger. I also would have preferred going home and making myself a salad. I keep hoping for a perfect meat substitute, but in the meantime I'll stick to eating less meat and mostly from identifiably good-practice sources.
Have any of you tried this? What did you think?
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Anything you do to capture ecological productivity for your purposes kills whatever else would have used it, directly or indirectly. It doesn't matter if you're growing carrots or raising beef, something with nerves, eyes, and a spine ceased to exist for your dinner. It's possible to be bothered by the direct version more than the indirect version, but I'm generally with the pastoralists about this; there's a lot more ecological responsibility, especially in dry land (where water is the primary productivity constraint) in pastoralism and meat-eating than there is in irrigated crops or the kind of nothing-lives cropland we're increasingly seeing now. (The entire ecological guild of aerial insectivores, birds, bats, and bugs, are going extinct because there aren't enough bugs for them to eat. Not the only bad thing happening from agricultural practices.)
(My take on the "can't afford" is that wages are too low, not that sustainable farming is too expensive. Which I acknowledge is no immediate help to anyone.)