Poulet Farci or Poulet Farce?

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.

When you pull apart the Missouri invention, it disjoins the way chicken does, with a few random strands of "meat" hanging loosely.

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?

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.

Meatless Mondays

In this article, the Washington Post's Jane Black contends that this is a movement that "has legs." She writes:

It's probably no surprise that Sir Paul McCartney, a longtime vegetarian, banned all meat from staff meals on his current world tour. But when Mario Batali starts to push people to eat their vegetables, you know something is happening.

The famously rotund and infamously gluttonous chef-restaurateur is to pig what the Beatles are to rock-and-roll. ... yet this month, Batali announced that he would join the Meatless Monday campaign, a movement backed by a broad array of public-health advocates, animal welfare activists and environmentalists that asks carnivores to give up meat one day a week.

I'm a carnivore, but passing on meat one day a week would be no problem for me. There are lots of tasty options: pizza and curried Indian-style veggies, for example.

Summer Salads

This is a great article to tuck away for future consultation. Courtesy of the N.Y. Times' The Minimalist, here are a whole bunch of ideas for simple but tasty summer salads. It will take you two or three years to try all of these salad recipes.

The couscous and orange salad sounds really nice. So does the salad with figs, crumbled bacon and blue cheese.