What is the world coming to? It's a question worth pondering after reading this article from Time magazine:This spring, scientists at the University of Missouri announced that after more than a decade of research, they had created the first soy product that not only can be flavored to taste like chicken but also breaks apart in your mouth the way chicken does: not too soft, not too hard, but with that ineffable chew of real flesh.Perhaps I should be open-minded about this new kind of, um, "chicken," but it seems very strange that people will go to such an extreme to try to deceive people into thinking they are eating meat. Is this basically an admission that it's unrealistic to think that carnivores will ever embrace vegetables that taste like . . . . vegetables?
When you pull apart the Missouri invention, it disjoins the way chicken does, with a few random strands of "meat" hanging loosely.
Yet the University researchers came up with a product that isn't quite a perfect forgery. According to Time:
But while Missouri's fake chicken has the right consistency, it still has to be flavored — and heavily salted — to taste like meat.
So if you have a salt-restricted diet, eating real chicken makes more sense. Look at that lovely poulet roti pictured above. How could someone settle for faux chicken when they could enjoy a slice of white or dark meat from that wonderful chicken? Beats me.
