my interest in vegan products: let's tackle the issue head-on

The question was asked: what's my interest in vegan products? Maybe it's time for a little self-psychoanalysis.

To be clear, I'm a confirmed, unreconstructed carnivore, and I have no interest in becoming vegan. Gimme my burgers; gimme my bacon; gimme all my fleshly protein. I acknowledge that veganism, when done right, can be a very healthy lifestyle: my brother Sean was vegan for a long time, and he lost a ton of weight that way thanks to admirable self-discipline and a sincere dedication to his dietary path. I have no such dedication.

That said, I do find myself fascinated by the urge to create vegan products that are facsimiles of their non-vegan originals. An often-asked question is why vegans would bother to reproduce food that they've rejected in going vegan. All sorts of reasons are offered. Among them: some vegans love their new lifestyle but do find themselves occasionally craving something that harks back to how they used to live—tastes and textures with some kind of sentimental value. Other vegans see these vegan facsimiles as a way to seduce non-vegans like me over to the dark side. Still other vegans reject the issue entirely, and frankly, these are the vegans whose opinions I trust the most. In this camp are the vegans who become nauseated upon taking one bite of an Impossible Burger, claiming that the burger is so realistically beeflike that they want to vomit. I'm more inclined to trust that sort of negative reaction than the reaction of a vegan who eats, say, a Beyond Burger and claims the burger tastes exactly like a regular burger (it doesn't—Beyond tastes like goddamn cat food).

So for the moment, let's view the urge to create vegan products that taste non-vegan charitably. The next step, beyond the desire to create such products, is to create them for real. So what we have now is an intellectual challenge, a puzzle to be solved, and this gets us closer to understanding where I'm coming from: despite not being a food scientist, I appreciate the riddle of trying to recreate a known food product from completely different ingredients. It's a bit like the philosophical question of functionalism in artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind: if we were able to construct a brain from artificial neurons that performed exactly the way biological neurons perform, and if we were able to arrange these artificial cells in such a way as to make a brain (with all the artificial neurons interrelating the same way organic cells interrelate), would we then have an actual mind? Can you make a recognizable mind out of non-biological material, or is the result merely the philosopher's zombie, i.e., something that closely mimics conscious behavior but isn't actually conscious? Shades of the philosopher's zombie problem. Back to food, then: is it possible to create cheese without using any of the materials normally used to create real cheese, and can we make meat that possesses the signal traits of meat without actually being meat?

My fascination with this question feeds directly into my interest in vegan food, not because I actively want to go vegan, but more because I want to check, periodically, how close vegan researchers are getting to reproducing a successful facsimile of meat, cheese, etc. In my recent post on two vegan products I'd just bought, I pronounced myself impressed with both vegan mayo and vegan cheddar. I'd be happy to use both in future sandwiches. Earlier, I had tried to make my own vegan "meat," and that effort turned out to be more successful for nachos than it did for burgers. I plan to keep at it, with my goal being to reproduce something like the Plant Whopper from that Australian company—a burger that was impressively beeflike (for me, anyway: my Korean coworker didn't like it, and the burger lasted only a few months on the market before it got pulled).

So I hope that offers some insight into my head for the people who are wondering why a carnivore might have any interest in vegan products. While I said above that I remain a dedicated carnivore, I could be convinced to add some non-meat products into my diet if those products proved to be sufficiently meatlike, cheeselike, etc. As things stand, though, vegetarian meals that don't even bother to simulate meat or cheese (e.g., as might be found at a Buddhist temple) are overall more appealing to me. Which reminds me: I ought to go back to Dongguk University to eat a lunch at their 채식당/chaeshikdang (vegetarian restaurant), an awesome buffet where I never miss meat. (At least for a few hours.)