By: Victoria Edel
I bought new fake chicken nuggets last week. The brand is called “Daring.”, with the period, which was already a red flag. They describe their offering not as chicken nuggets, but as “breaded plant chicken pieces,” which is also a red flag. I guess maybe Daring. wants you to put these in salad or something, but i ate them with ketchup and mayonnaise.
They were good. They were perhaps too good! They were so chicken-y it was bizarre. A normal, meat-based chicken nugget doesn't really have anything to do with real chicken. That's part of why "plant-based chicken" nuggets — or, as we used to call them when i stopped eating meat 11 years ago, vegetarian chicken nuggets — are so easy to achieve. They have some texture, but they're kind of just mush surrounded by breading.
Daring.'s offerings were not mush. As I ate, the fake meat came apart in strips, the way normal, meat chicken does. It's been so long since I ate something like that that I was taken aback. I honestly felt kind of nauseous, and I think it's because it felt too meaty.
Fake meat is divisive. People who eat meat LOVE to make fun of vegans and vegetarians for eating meat. A quick way to go viral on Twitter is to make fun of someone for making vegetarian buffalo wings or lobster rolls or ox tail. I hate these people. Clowning on vegetarians is so boring and hack. No one is ever going to force you to eat mushrooms and pretend they're clams. This isn't for you! It's for people who don't eat meat! Go away!
But there are vegetarians and vegans who also hate fake meat. Basically they say that they stopped eating meat because they don't like it, so they don't want to eat things that are meaty. These are the people who complain that they liked when veggie burgers tasted like veggies. They are mad Burger King replaced their veggie burger (which was just a Morningstar patty) with the Impossible Whopper. They love beans so much.
I don't relate to that group (though I do love beans). I do miss specific things about eating meat. I miss my mom's linguine with clam sauce on Christmas. I miss meatballs. I miss Italian sausage. I miss McDonald's chicken nuggets. I am grateful that using Beyond meat fake ground beef I can make a pretty good meatball. I love basically all fake sausage. And there are many fake meat products I hope someone creates soon. I would like a fake prosciutto. I want to make a sandwich with fake salami. I need innovation in the fake shrimp space!
But I don't know that the companies that make the fake meat are actually doing a good job. Morningstar was the stalwart of American fake meat for years — as a college vegetarian, I ate many, many Morningstar chicken nuggets. Quorn and Boca were right there with them. None of these products are amazing, but they get the job done. For many people who are first moving away from eating meat, they are extremely helpful as you figure out what exactly it is you're going to eat now.
Then the Beyond/Impossible revolution began in the later part of the 2010s. This is when non-vegetarians and vegans became widely aware that this stuff doesn't taste terrible. But I've found the way they go about making these fake meat products weird. There's this huge focus on making the fake meats "realistic." With burgers especially, there was this fascination with making a "burger that bleeds." They got tons of headlines about this. But I don't know anyone who doesn't eat meat that thought, "The problem with veggie burgers is that they don't bleed." I haven't eaten meat since 2011 — I don't really remember what it tastes like! I don't need burgers that bleed. I don't need chicken that's identical to real chicken. I just need it to be in the general ballpark.
(Allow me to rant about the term "plant-based" for a moment. I hate it. Today I had "plant-based" granola which is just....regular granola. Calling a product "plant-based" isn't really marketing for vegans and vegetarians, it's marketing for omnivores who think "plant-based" means this will help them lose weight and be "healthy." It's for people who are afraid of buying something that says "vegetarian chicken nugget" on it. There is nothing plant-like about fake meat, and that's fine.)
(At the same time, the siren call of messed-up eating patterns is widespread in America that I also have to look at myself. Have I only kept a vegetarian diet for eleven years because having some sort of restriction makes me feel morally superior? Does it make me feel in control, the way a weight loss regimen does? I don't know!)
The other part of the fake meat discussion that American media — which is dominated by white people — doesn't have, is that Asian companies have made wonderful fake meat for a very long time. Red Bamboo, a restaurant block away from Washington Square Park, is a smorgasbord of amazing meat substitutes. May Wah in New York has basically every fake meat you can dream of. Tofu — the most classic meat substitute — has been slandered in the west by idiot white people who don't know how to cook it. Getting over my worries about cooking tofu has opened up so many delicious avenues for me.
So where does this leave us? There's still no perfect substitution for a McDonald's nugget. I can't figure out what combination of mushrooms will taste the most like a clam. I had fake sausage with peppers for dinner last night. It seems like most companies trying to the whole fake meat thing are more interested in courting the omnivores who feel kind of bad about how much meat they eat, and want to feel "healthy," then they are at appealing to people who actually don't eat meat, but I will probably still continue to buy their weird products to figure out what's actually good.
This is only kind of related, but you can skip the fake meat at KFC. 0 out of 10, do not recommend.