I love meat but I've always struggled to reconcile my love of eating it with my love of animals. I would be happy to pay a premium if it meant I could get meat-like taste without the guilt
Hook it up to Watson and you don't just get new recipes, but they're combined with new meat! (https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/trends-news/ar...)
When I want to cook savory foods, there's certain things you can look to:
1. Miso pastes. There's several kinds but in a regular American grocery with international sections you'll usually find a mild white miso and a slightly more pungent red one. Both are usually savory. I am sure Chinese and Japanese groceries will have more options.
2. Seaweed
3. Certain vegetable broth brands - "Better than Bouillan" vegetable stock, with the green label, is extremely savory
4. Less of an impact, but certain foods, like lentils and tempeh can impart an earthy, savory flavor
You'd be surprised how many flavors you can get mixing these in various quantities, along with other seasonings such as liquid aminos, liquid smoke, nutritional yeast, roasted tomatoes, and soy sauce.
My biggest piece of advice for anyone wanting to learn how to cook really good vegetable based meals (and who doesn't want to adopt an already established ethnic vegan diet) is to forget ingredients and instead focus on techniques. Cooking is applied chemistry. You need to understand why certain foods and certain preparations give certain results. You can then replicate similar results.
It's not so much that you want to imitate the "meaty" flavour of beef bones, but rather that you want to create a similarly satisfying broth. If you try to imitate an existing food, you will always end up with a pale shadow of that food. Instead make something that has the same value, but with a different ingredient. It will be different just like chicken stock is different from beef stock which is different than lamb stock which is different than pork stock. But it will be just as good.
For stocks, it's complicated because vegetables are sweet. You want umami for stocks. As much as possible keep the sweetness out of the stock (because it will get in there no matter what you do). Fermented proteins (miso as others have said -- but make sure to get the oldest you can find), beans/lentils, rice, etc. Stay away from things like a mirepoix because it will add too much sweetness. You can add onions, but caramelise them down to being black, etc, etc. To be honest, there is too much to making a good stock to explain here. You just need to practice and adjust until you get what you are looking for. Learning an ethnic cuisine that is already traditionally vegan will help a lot if you pay attention to the techniques they are using. At the same time consider what a bone stock is doing in a stock pot. What is meat? What is connective tissue? What is skin? What is marrow? What happens when you simmer that for 5 hours?
You can make great vegan stocks and it is fun to learn how to do it, but it takes an inventive spirit.
I believe reconciling all of these as ethically equal (including raising the ethical weight of killing a plant as equal to an animal) is important for sanely dealing with our natural ecosystem of food. The "aliveness" of plants is continually researched and shown in a positive light, and it's hard to draw a clear and reasonable line between "life that is acceptable to eat" and "life that is not acceptable to eat".
When you look at the spectrum of life and how ethically impactful killing it for food is, it tends to follow anthropomorphism and social compatibility with humans, which doesn't seem objective enough to be pursued for widely-accepted ethics, but merely for local cultural acceptability.
Ending life to feed our own is how much of nature works, and we have to deal with being a part of that in our ethical thinking, regardless of how associated we are with the life we're ending.
It's simply something to think about: Most people are as flippant about ending the life of a plant, as some are about ending the life of an animal (or various different species of animal, including fish & insects).
How about the line between "life that will likely suffer when prepared for us to eat" and "life that will likely not suffer when prepared for us to eat"?
IIRC, trees release specific substances into their root systems in response to damage or illness in order to communicate to nearby trees. Dying trees will even give up their sugar reserves to feed younger, healthier trees.
So, while it may not be on the same level as animals, I can see an argument being made that trees respond to something resembling "pain" or "suffering".
I did a quick search and stumbled across this article[1] from the Smithsonian Magazine which corroborates some of this and expounds on it a bit. It waxes a bit... mystical, I guess? It does seem to be based on science, but the only thing it links to are books on the subject. So, you know, grain of salt. It's a place to start, though.
1: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering...
Life both begins and ands and you don't have to run away from the end of things or think that making life as long as possible is necessarily better.
Appreciation for the life that was given for my nourishment is important to me and I really take it seriously. I make an effort to not waste any meat I buy and I've definitely shifted to eating less than I used to.
sounds like "we take security very seriously"
> Animals are my friends and I don’t eat my friends. --George Bernard Shaw
https://gist.github.com/samueleaton/cccfd86dcca72bc33f72bdfa...
Sorry to bring this up, but I'm curious as to the circumstances around this. Did you not know you were eating meat? Or did you eat, and realize later that it was incompatible with your ethics?
I eat meat solely for the taste, which, when I get down to thinking about it, is a shallow and selfish reason
Sadly if everyone did this it would probably mean we would only see cows, sheep etc in zoos, rather than grazing in fields.
Downvoters - I live in the Midwest. I grew up on a farm. Much of my family still farms and raises livestock. Factory farming of livestock is not the norm for non-poultry.
I grew up in Indiana. Now, I've not lived there in 5 years, but I did live quite some time in a place that pigs outnumbered people in the county. The county seat was 3000. Even smelling pigs was becoming a rarity while out on a country drive and a flood meant that thousands of pigs drowned in a flooded barn ("pig factory").
Perhaps you are in a place where the pigs usually roam free, but I certainly wasn't.
[0] https://www.aspca.org/animal-cruelty/farm-animal-welfare
According to Dr. Hershaft, a holocaust survivor which has dedicated his life to researching animal rights, it is estimated that less than 1% of the meat in the US are from smallscale family farms, he and his team did an AMA on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2h8df0/i_am_an_80year...
> A factory farm is a large, industrial operation that raises large numbers of animals for food.
That's an _extremely_ broad definition that says nothing about the condition of the animals.
On the flip side, I also get to interact with the animals - stroke them, feed them apples etc. It makes me happier that they have a good life, and also sadder as I can see that they're actual creatures with a life.
Eh, not really, as cows and sheep and goats still provide valuable resources. Milk and wools, for example. I'm guessing lots of other things can be taken as they die naturally - leathers and stuff from bones and pet foods and whatnot. Sure, we could eventually engineer ourselves out of needing farm animals, but it is going to take some time.
Granted, I am excited for this meat/burger to be available to the public even if you shy away from eating it. I don't eat meats outside of fish anyway and I'm always excited to get tastier edible stuff.
Nut milks are an odd thing. They aren't really nutritionally the same nor do they behave similarly while cooking. The taste is lacking and I highly doubt they can make cheese. And if I remember correctly, many nuts milks are also bad for the environment - much better to just eat the nuts. I don't know if this is the same for oat milks. Soy milk is simply not edible. (I don't personally drink milk, but do cook with it).
Milk is truly one of those things that has to replace all functions for it to be a viable switch. The same goes for eggs.
All this basically to say that just because there is an alternative doesn't really mean it is viable. Cotton doesn't replace wools and neither do synthetic fabrics, for example. Not to mention that at least some synthetics are made with petroleum products. I always hope they are otherwise waste products from producing fuel (like many other plastics), but I'm not sure.
I'm don't disagree with the rest of your comment, but I think the better comparison here would be to compare nut milk to what it's substituting for, which in this case is regular milk.
I think they would just kill the boy calves, and keep the girls.
It takes time to breed a herd of cattle. My friend had an outbreak of foot and mouth and he lost his whole herd one time. It took years and years and years to build it back up. At best you can double your herd size every year. In practice, though, some cows don't produce a calf every year. Also, there are cows that you don't want because they don't have the traits you want. But once you have the herd size you want, it is a steady state thing.
I tried to find some place to find the volume of cattle traded that's not destined for slaughter, but the data doesn't exist. It seems that dairy cows are traded mostly via want ads on the internet these days. Here's a typical site that specializes in it: https://www.dairylivestockservices.com.au/stock-for-sale/ Notice how all of the livestock is fully grown. That's because these are livestock from failed farms. I don't think anybody sells calves because there just isn't a market for it. You can't sell calves for meat either, because as I mentioned earlier, it's not economical (the price for a meat calf going to slaughter is only $125!)
It is sad to think about it, but the reality is that milk production necessarily relies on the death of cows to stay economical. If we drank a lot less milk and were willing to pay maybe 10x the price for it, then you could change that fairly easily. However, it's just not possible at anywhere near the price point we have for food right now.