When fake meat tastes a little too real...
I like fake meat. Fake chicken patties, fake chicken nuggets, fake burgers, fake corndogs, tofu in meat-like form, but sometimes fake meat crosses the line and becomes too real. I was excited to go to the "the fake meat place" with Jorge Thursday night. I hadn't been there for a while, and my memories of the "meat" were pretty fuzzy. Except, I did remember the fake shrimp, white with some kind of applied orange color to fairly accurately represent a real cooked shrimp. We ordered kung pao "chicken". This dish was really good, tiny deep fried nuggets of some tofu substance. Jorge wanted to have the full fake meat experience, so we also ordered a mixed meat noodle dish. The "beef" was the least meat-like, slightly spongy, but it looked pretty real. As I mentioned, the "shrimp" looked very shrimp-like, and it tasted kind of like shrimp. Then there was the "ham". The "ham" was the most meat-like. I started to eat it, and I began to feel a little queasy as I looked at the little white stringy bits hanging out of the pink veggie protein flesh. How do they make it look so much like ham? I kept going. Mind over matter. I kept telling myself "it isn't meat, it's made from a plant". I barely finished my one little piece of ham. I felt queasy the whole way home and vowed never to eat fake ham again.