Fake bacon?
4 Likes
Over here in the UK, the best vegan bacon alternative I’ve found is Vivera Plant Bacon.
It’s been so long since I’ve had real bacon now, I have no idea if it tastes like the real thing any more, but that doesn’t stop it being yummy.
They also do a cracking Plant Shwarma.
Edit: The thing I miss most being vegan is cheese. Vegan cheese ranges from awful to mediocre. I fantasise about good English cheeses such as Stilton, Double Gloucester, Red Leicester and mature Cheddar, but have come to terms that no-one’s ever going to crack making a passable vegan alternative.
If you’ve never had it, a proper English mature cheddar has cheese crystals in it, which are a taste explosion.
3 Likes
ETA - I have no interest in eating ethical cloned meat, but I would love me some replicator cheese!
4 Likes
The pretend stuff is just another version of “have your cake and eat it” - and when has that ever worked as intended for an ethical question?
4 Likes
Taste is subjective. If I like fake bacon, am I wrong?
Food snobbery pisses me right off.
2 Likes
My question is why is bacon held in such high esteem and why is that love is so strong that a perfect simulacra of bacon warrants so much attention?
I’m thinking that it is a working class luxury that is taboo for many. Champagne, caviar, truffles, foie gras, shark fin and bird nest are all luxuries that us common folk do not have a common point of reference. No one is trying to achieve these tastes and textures as they do bacon.
In the idea of meat and potatoes there is clearly a hero in much the same way as ‘we’ can understand wine and beer. Class and taste in food (and drink) in modern consumer culture seems to be how we define ‘our’ selves…
Once we crack the ‘bacon’ conundrum we can all live in peace and harmony… at least until we democratize all other foods…
Hmmm, I like spicy but not to hot! /s
I came here to say exactly this. I’m neither vegan nor vegetarian, but I enjoy both and incorporate a lot of them in my diet. I have a few ex-omnivore friends (ex-omnivores, not ex-friends) who have told me they enjoy my meat-free cooking more than they enjoy their own. Turns out they are constantly trying to reproduce things they miss (like bacon) from their meat-eating days rather than focusing on getting the best of their chosen ingredients.
On the other hand, I have picked up a lot of really great tips from people who are meat-free (either lifelong or ex-omnivore) and focus on making a great meal rather than a faux whatever.
3 Likes
Try frying slices of tempeh in peanut oil.
2 Likes
I’ve recently been looking into Native American cookery (as a way to learn more about the people who lived here before me) and found out that frybread is kind of fraught. It wasn’t (as far as what I’ve found) a normal thing until after European contact, and according to some sites I’ve stumbled upon, until after they were shunted into reservations and provided with foodstuffs from the invaders (my ancestors).
3 Likes
hmm, i believe it. but based on what i have seen with the local Paiute tribe, they have certainly embraced it and made it their own, then. they make the best fry bread i’ve ever had.
4 Likes
Also, the oldest parts of the human brain have evolved to crave sugar and fat. Bacon usually has plenty of fat, and many styles of (U.S.) bacon have plenty of sweeteners.
And yeah, it is a flavor from home, a cultural thing.
Caviar is not strictly a class thing. I know enough Japanese and Russians personally to know that eating fish eggs is very much a flavor-from-home and growing-up times, plus the umami angle again, wrt caviar.
As for champagne, my experiences visiting EU countries tells me it’s not snobbery and rich people who drink and control the supply of that specific sparkling wine from one area of France.
So I beg to differ on the luxury food argument.
People like what they like. I was schooled early on when I’d feed a baby who clearly displayed food preferences that, I found out later, had much to do with what his/her mom ate during pregnancy. My guess is people who love bacon had moms who love bacon and ate it in enough quantity to predispose a human-child toward liking it.
This in utero flavor inclination is not a be-all-end-all. My mom could not eat and did not like spicy food. I love spicy food. It’s been one of the nice payoffs living in Texas–it’s all around me and it’s all delicious.
5 Likes
Yes bacon is delicious.
I was wondering why other delicious foods don’t get the same amount of attention?
Just wanted to start a conversation around food and taste and cultural perceptions.
Food and music are the universals of human experience that can be base as well as abstracted into the most significant defining aspects of cultures and societies.
2 Likes
Can’t speak to in utero taste acquisition, but it is pretty well established that flavor compounds that cross into breast milk strongly influence a child’s preferences. Things like garlic, onion, many spices and, unfortunately, tobacco, have this effect. Those tastes become strongly associated with comfort and “home.” Not certain if this explains my apparently abnormal love of liver and onions, but there you go.
5 Likes
For me it’s human brains!
The best thing about Burning Man was the Navajo Taco truck on the way home!
3 Likes
Is that from Smoke Signals, or something else? I know I have seen it…
1 Like
1 Like
Fry bread is a great Indian recipe.
1 Like
I think for some people – maybe especially in the US?–
it’s a sort of guilty-pleasure-bragging thing. Most everyone knows it’s not very a very healthy food. Pizza can be that way too, like, "I know it’s bad for me, but it tastes so gooood!!" Maybe the country’s Puritan roots play into that? 
3 Likes
