So I’m always a bit bemused when I read articles pondering why our grandparents cooked such dreadful food. True, reading about your grandmother’s idea of what constituted a nice Asian meal is a bit lip-puckering. But why are people forced into flights of fancy to explain why our near ancestors ate like this? All too often, cooking is explained in terms of social norms about femininity, or immigrants, or, in one New York Times column, the Cold War. This is all very well for sophomore sociology classes, but why does no one ever offer simple theories such as “they liked it”; “they thought it looked pretty like that”; or “that was what they could afford”? Having read quite a lot of the era's cookbooks and food writing, I find these the most likely reasons for the endless parade of things molded, jellied, bemayonnaised and enbechameled.
Is it possible to out-eat the price you pay for a buffet? How do these places make money? We looked at the dollars and cents behind the meat and potatoes.
After centuries of a veritable monopoly, meat might have finally met its match. The challenger arises not from veggie burgers or tofu or seitan, but instead from labs where animal cells are being cultured and grown up into slabs that mimic (or, depending on whom you ask, mirror) meat. It currently goes by many names—in-vitro meat, cultured meat, lab-grown meat, clean meat—and it might soon be vying for a spot in the cold case next to more traditionally made fare. To put it bluntly: the kind that comes from living animals, slaughtered for food.
Cultured-meat manufacturers like Just Inc. and Memphis Meats are hoping to provide consumers with meat that is just like its predecessor, that tastes and looks and feels and smells exactly the same as something you might get in stores today but will be more sustainable. Whether that will turn out to be true won’t be clear for some time. But there’s another, more immediate battle heating up between the cattle industry and these new entrants into the meaty ring. So buckle up and put on your wonkiest hat, because the labeling war is about to begin.
Inquiries into the deaths of British teenagers after eating buttermilk, sesame and peanut have highlighted the sometimes tragic consequences. In 2018, a six-year-old girl in Western Australia died as the result of a dairy allergy.
The rise in allergies in recent decades has been particularly noticeable in the West. Food allergy now affects about 7% of children in the UK and 9% of those in Australia, for example. Across Europe, 2% of adults have food allergies.
Though plenty of vegetarian and vegan diets don’t include anything made to imitate meat, “meatless meat” and “plant-based protein” are nothing new. Ask anyone who’s ordered mock duck (aka seitan) in their pad Thai. Cartoonist Maki Naro outlined the history of mock meat for The Nib, from tofu in ancient China to the peanut-butter-and-seitan mix Protose, developed by John Harvey Kellogg (yes, the Kellogg of cereal-brand fame) in the early 1900s. But in the past few decades, as Naro points out, meatless meat has gotten a boost from “unabashed capitalists,” who sensed a growing interest in eating less meat and “flexitarian” diets and decided the existing beans and lentils and seitan weren’t enough.
Hence the rise of “plant-based meat substitutes,” which promise to mimic the texture, and even the bleeding, of “real” meat for those who can’t do without those specific oral sensations. In the public imagination, the term came to the forefront mostly where applied to fast-food patties, with Impossible Whoppers and Impossible White Castle sliders, Dunkin’ Beyond sausage breakfast sandwiches and KFC plant-based fried chicken. A decade ago, a meatless burger patty would have been advertised as “vegetarian” or “vegan” cuisine, but now, it’s all “plant-based.” And that has turned it into a phrase that means everything and nothing.
Usage of “plant-based” is now expanding from shorthand for “meat substitute” to refer to just about everything, including products that were already vegan or vegetarian (aka, made of plants) to begin with. Case in point: a PR email I got from Ancient Harvest about its line of “plant-based pasta.” Pasta is traditionally made from wheat flour. And in case you haven’t cast your gaze upon a golden field lately, wheat is a plant. All pasta is plant-based. The company specifies that its POW! Pasta brand is made from other plants — chickpeas and lentils — so that it is both gluten-free and full of protein. Which is great! But “plant-based” as a descriptor of ingredients doesn’t technically differentiate it from any other past
