It is. There are many great examples in the cooking world.
“Monsterchef” as you refer to it, would never be up to the challenge of a $2 meal or anything prepared from contents resembling what might be in our pantries.
They have occasionally featured cooking using left overs! That’s chef talk for scraps from last night. Sort of the other half of all the carrot they cut off to leave a square for a perfect julienne. Or perhaps the remainder of the beast once they had cut out the eye fillets, a back strap or H-bone cut for roasting? It lost me several series back as even a casual viewer.
Admittedly what is on the plate in these orchestrated entertainment unreality programs usually still looks like meat and does not masquerade as something else. However equally it looks absolutely nothing like a meal you would eat at home. In that sense it is also easy to label it as blatant food fakery?
If the goal is to present food in an appealing way, it would appear there are no limits to what is right or wrong. That includes magic towers of cream, chocolate and crafted sugar presented as desserts, and worthy of The Louvre.
I’m happy to have my lentils or soy burger any way the cook chooses. I’d be wary also of telling the cook what to call it, or risk becoming part of a culinary work of art.
I’m vegetarian (on the way to vegan) as I just couldn’t be part of the cruelty inherent in producing meat. Live animal export was the catalyst which started me off, then I learned more about the realities of pig farming, the masceration of male chicks and the terrible sadness involved in the dairy industry. With cows needing to be permanently giving milk, they must also be constantly pregnant and the new borns most often taken from their mothers at birth, Female calves kept, male calves boxed up to produce veal, or sent off to the abattoir. Then there was the overall environmental impact which is a whole subject in itself and a major one.
There has been a lot if information about the pig industry on the internet, much of which was based on historical practices. In Australia pigs are either…
Free Range – where all sows, boars and their piglets live outside
Outdoor Bred: Raised Indoors on Straw – where sows and boars live outside all their life, and their progeny, when weaned, are bought inside into shelters and raised on straw
Indoor – where all sows, boars and their progeny live inside.
It is possible to easily obtain pork which has been raised as free range, including sows.
Also, in some operations measures are adopted after a sow giving birth to ensure that the piglets are not squashed or injured by their mother. While these measures are seen as extreme and often shown by activist and mass media, one has to also recognise that death of oiglets by their mother is a real risk especially in the early days on a piglets life. Such needs to be considered if one consumes pork.
Probably true for most Australians, but in remote areas not as easy - accepting of course this is by far the minority - excepting for those of us out in the wastelands, I think your points are well made.
CHOICE has a good article on the plight of the oinker:
I don’t know if you did that deliberately but it gave me a chuckle. Anyway - the article I read suggested consumers had real choice for most animals and that in most cases they would by default be free range (beef here is measured in square kilometres per head) but the pig was sadly lacking in most cases. Maybe the article is out of date, but it put me off pig products to some degree. Except bacon … sorry I wonder if its time for an update of said article?
Sadly the mass media seems disinterested in the industry - activists, like the ones decoupling road trains at truck stops ‘in the interests of animals’, are far more newsworthy. The extremes of both sides are , at best, equally insidious …
Believing in something is very different to showing or demonstrating something. There is a myth that soy is bad for us, but studies have shown that these fears are merely myths. Consuming soy is, in fact, fine. Generally speaking, naturopaths are not quality sources of information - particularly when it comes to nutrition, health, and medical issues. Talk to a registered, practicing dietician (the ones who studied nutrition for at least four years at university) for high-quality nutrition advice.
Just a note: the new high-tech brewed/cultured meats are real in the sense that they are meat, not something else trying to look like meat. It isn’t quite right to refer to them as “fake”.
Also note that they are no more made in a “lab” than any newly-designed food. As soon as they are ready to be produced for consumption they will come from a “brewery” or something like that. It won’t be a “lab”.
There have been a number of studies concerning the hormone effects of soy consumption. I cannot comment on every naturopath of course, however, both my wife and I have been positively helped with specific medical conditions by advice and direction from a qualified naturopath. In fact my naturopath works closely with my cardiologist and my cardiologist has recommended him. Believeing that only the traditional mainstream professionals, such as dieticians, have the answers is a very limited view. I am not some gullible greenie who follows humming therapy and I most certainly believe that treatments should be backed up by scientific verification and testing. Some naturopaths may be quacks I am sure, but not all are by any means. Soy is not the golden bean that some anti meat enthusiasts think it is.
Imagine in the future when we have meat that is grown or brewed without the intervention of living animals and that looks and tastes as good as conventionally farmed meat and has a similar nutritional profile, and has the same price.
Let’s call this “clean meat” to denote both its lack of ethical baggage over animal suffering and also, literally, its hygiene, as it’s produced in a facility with no livestock of stockfeed, excrement, antibiotics, dirt, parasites, etc.
Which would you choose to buy in that imaginary future?
If your answer is the clean meat, then I’m with you. We don’t have that future just yet, but it doesn’t look too far off, and in the meantime, I plan to try out whatever they make, and it’ll only get better.
“Chicken Little” as imagined in The Space Merchants [Pohl & Kornbluth 1952]
One of the greatest satiric future-fiction novels. I nearly said ‘satyric’ - no there’s none of that it’s all PG 13.
It has been investigated in the lab several times but AFAIK never got as far as a serious attempt at commercialisation. I suspect that is because, despite the inefficiency of growing plants to feed to animals to eat them, doing it in a tank is even less efficient.
In an ecology there is a food chain (a pyramid if you like) with the carnivores at the top. In nature there are very few carnivores compared to herbivores and very few herbivores to micro-organisms.
Perhaps our problem is not the inefficiency of the hierarchy but the number of carnivores. Reducing the numbers at the top might solve other problems too.
No. When I want vegetables I will eat real vegetables. When I want fruit I will eat real fruit. When I want meat or fish I will eat the real stuff in each case. I object to processed foods which are flavored to give you a false impression. So I object to all the artificial colors and flavors and I object even more to having vegetarian and even worse vegan stuff being pushed onto us, and most of all I strenuously object to attempts to make people feel guilty about eating meat.
I also suspect that the quality/nutrituional value of the final laboratory product is also considerably less than the real McCoy. Not all animal cells can be replicated in laboratory conditions and it is likely that the laboratory experiments only use those cells know to replicate and grow. This would result in a cell matrix vastly different to that found in animals and is unlikely to have the same nutritional values. While it may be a food developed from animals/meat, I think it won’t be meat but some form of simple animal cell matrix.
One has to also remember that growing plant cells and tissue culture in laboratory is vastly different to that of animal cells. It is possible to regenerate/replicate the parent using plant cells, but scientists are unable to recreate a whole new organism from a animal cells or tissue.
I’m not so sure! Check out Memphis Meats for actual results. Look at their timeline on their home page. Yes it’s early days, but it doesn’t seem to be cause for pessimism.
To put the developments of the past few years into perspective, the San Francisco startup Memphis Meats is now producing clean meat for $40 per gram, which is less than one - fiftieth of the cost from just a few years ago. And Dr. Post’s company, Mosa Meats, plans to sell its clean meat hamburgers for $10 a patty by 2020.
The end goal is to produce clean meat that is cheaper than even the least expensive conventionally produced chicken. Leading experts believe that is achievable within 10 years given adequate support for clean meat research and development.
Clean meat production clearly allows for economies of scale that conventional farming doesn’t. It’s early days and continued improvements seem plausible.
I don’t doubt at all that you feel better after visiting a naturopath. There is, in fact, a lot that evidence-based medicine can learn from alternative medicine (mostly with relationship building, but this says more about modern medicine trying to provide free, quality care to as many people as possible).
That aside, you have still been provided information explaining the myth of soy’s harm; yet you reject this information due to some ideology. Consider all the evidence then form an opinion, rather than clasping to an opinion and finding the evidence to suit.
I would rather trust the canon of scientists, doctors, and dieticians that say soy is perfectly fine, rather than one potentially quacky naturopath (which we know the field is riddled with).
Please read my comment again. I never said my wife and I “felt better” after visiting a naturopath. I don’t base my decisions regarding medical treatments on feelings, which are notoriously unreliable. Without going into details I will simply say that the conditions we had were tested by regular blood tests as well as visits to mainstream medicos and that we have both positively benefited from advice and products recommended by naturopaths. A good naturopath is not a witch doctor, but rather someone who should have a thorough knowledge of how the body works and how what we eat, drink and breathe etc effects our bodily functions. I find it interesting that more and more now I am reading medical research that backs up what many naturopaths have been advising for years.
I don’t keep a file of documents on soy and its effects but I will say again that with the exception of fermented soy products, excess consumption of soy is associated with hormonal inbalance and quite serious health issues. Soy was the “elixir of life” for the alternative lifestyle and vegetarian movement for years, but now after years of consumption, the long term results are not encouraging. A simple computer search will produce hundreds of studies.
In an evidence based argument the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. If there are hundreds of studies could you please share one with us?
It’s not that I completely disbelieve you, it’s just I hate the way these debates always end in someone claiming something then telling everyone else to ‘just google it.’ You make the claim, you provide the proof.
I have given a few links from disparate sources. They show good and bad points re soy. The main issue seems to me that it is hormonal in its effects, which I see as potentially very dangerous.
I know at least one of these sources is very balanced because it is from a major health fund not known for its extremist or alternate views. Another is from a breast cancer advocacy group.
You are correct that at the moment the evidence re soy is ambigious. For me personally I will err on the side of caution. That does not mean I will never eat soy. In fact I drink a common flavoured drink that contains a small amount of soy and I have quite often eaten vegitarian dishes that contain tofu. However, I don’t make this a common event so I aim not to injest large amounts or frequent amounts of soy. Also when I do eat a vegitarian dish I try to choose one that uses meat alternatives other than soy. As I said my concern is many of the articles about soy mention its hormonal effects which I don’t think is a great idea to subject myself to long term. I also don’t like the idea of genetically modified crops and soy is one that, for some reason, is often from genetically modified sources.
as you refer to it, would never be up to the challenge of a $2 meal or anything prepared from contents resembling what might be in our pantries.
I wonder if its time for an update of said article?
