Originally published at: How about some 3D-printed vegan salmon? | Boing Boing
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Most salmon in stores is pretty bland and factory farmed. If it simulates the flavor and texture, sounds good.
Doesn’t that sound delicious! Is there Pudding Substitute for dessert?
Yeah, that ad made me less likely to want it. They very scrupulously avoided showing many closeups of the fillet, and mostly preferred to show it getting covered by stuff. Also, what was with that made-up UI for selecting how to print the product?
I’m fully onboard with more vegan substitutes, but the fish ones still don’t seem to be quite there yet. We tried vegan tunafish for a while for pasta al tonno, but it was hard to pretend that it didn’t taste like cardboard, so I use sardines now, which are pretty environmental and very tasty.
Just skip the futile effort trying to make these food substitutes palatable and just liquefy them and put them into IV bags.
Or make tablets to be downed with a cold glass of fresh OJ.
I can’t help but think there’s something fishy about this.
It’s interesting how people seem to be easily repulsed by “SIMULATED MEAT PRODUCT” and similar descriptions of things that are “meat” but are not “from an animal”. What is repulsive about ‘growing meat in a vat’ vs ‘killing an animal and consuming their flesh’?
What bout a Pringle? It’s a simulated potato chip made from powdered potato. What about a cheese puff, which is corn slurry that has been forced through a tiny hole by hot steam? What about yogurt and cheese, which are “milk that went bad, constructively” ?
Would love to try it.
Looks fine to me, but I’d have to taste it to know how I really felt. No, it’s not meat from a fish, but I don’t have an issue with that. I like burgers from cows, I like “mushroom burgers.” As long as it meets my nutritional needs and tastes reasonably good, I don’t care if it’s not just like the original thing.
It’s the Uncanny Meat Valley for me. Their “animals” look wrong.
Our marketing department has determined that what you really need is Sodium.
As a vegan I root for this stuff but I don’t think it’ll catch on until good marketing reframes it. Reminds me of when an American company tried to sell individually wrapped cheese to the French. It didn’t go over well, because, they later reasoned, unlike Americans, the French see cheese as living and breathing. It just needed to be repackaged in cloth. My reaction to 3D-printed salmon is off-putting in a way that is similar to how the French felt about cheese inside sealed “body bags”. What exactly makes it uncomfortable is unclear, but it might have something to do with it being reconstituted. Reminds people of Jello. No one likes the idea of food, especially meat, going from a goo to a solid, and then back to a goo again. So it should be marketed as “Meat that isn’t at all like Jello!” or at the very least, drop the whole 3D printed thing.
I’m a bit of an autocondimenter, but my go to is Penzeys 4/S
Pringles and similar potato chips made from powdered potato are strictly inferior to potato chips that are actual slices of potato.