Going vego is a big mis-steak
BEING vegetarian is a big missed steak — and a big mistake. The owners of the burger chain Grill’d will work that out soon enough. They’ve announced that by 2020, half of their menu will be plant-based.
You heard right. The best fast food chain in the country with the meatiest, juiciest burgers will be catering more and more for vegans and vegetarians. Say goodbye to the Wagyu Wunder and the Bonfire BBQ and hello to a sneaky little number called Vegan Cheeseburger 2.0.
It looks like a beef burger. It may even taste like a beef burger. But it’s made entirely from non-meaty ingredients like pea protein and chickpeas. It’s even got vegan mayo and vegan cheese made from coconut oil.
Explaining the move this week, Grill’d boss Simon Crowe said it reflected the growing number of “carnivores and flexitarians switching to plant-based alternatives”. Wait. What? Flexitarian? It’s a term to describe those who mainly eat a vegetarian diet, but eat meat and seafood on occasion. They’re vegetarians with benefits. Vegetarians on flexitime. To paraphrase Austin Powers, they are the Diet Coke of vegetarians. Just one burger, not quite veggo enough.
Flexitarians are vegetarians who cheat when they smell bacon cooking. They have their beef patty and eat it too.
As a proud carnivore, I’m not that excited about flexitarians banging on about how ethically-sourced, environmentally-friendly, biodynamic and sustainable their plant-based diet is. They’ll rant about the reduction in carbon emissions and the sanctity of animal life. Then they’ll get pissed and grab a Big Mac — with triple cheese and a triple bypass — on the way home.
Sadly, though, it’s a sign of the times.
There are already two million vegetarians in Australia — a number that’s set to grow by 50 per cent in coming years. I’ll bet many of them slip into flexitarianism when it suits.
Subspecies of flexitarians include pollotarians, who eat chicken but not meat from other mammals, and pescetarians, who eat seafood but not other meats. There’s also fruitarians, lacto-vegetarians, ovo-vegetarians and freegarians, who only eat the scraps from other people’s plates.
Grill’d is getting its patties from Beyond Meats, a US food producer which makes plant-based meat substitutes. Its high-profile financial backers include actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
This is where the whole meat-free thing gets really weird. Beyond Meat makes non-meat that looks like meat and which is sold in the meat aisle. There’s the Beyond Burger, which is billed as a “revolutionary plant-based burger that looks, cooks and satisfies like beef”. It’s made of pea protein and beetroot, among many other things.
The Beyond Burger websites notes that: “We wanted to keep the whole experience of cooking a burger as similar as possible for our flexitarian fans, so we’ve worked very hard to create a burger that changes colour as you cook it just like animal protein.”
It notes that the “beets we use to give the patty a red-meat appearance have led some in the media to remark that the burger ‘bleeds’ beet blood”.
Gee, and they think us meat-eaters are the crazy ones. Surely the last thing veggos want is a meat-free beeflike burger that bleeds fake blood?
It’s funny how hard vegans and vegetarians try to make their food look like meat or fish. There are many such products around. You can eat a “fishless fillet” that’s made of konja root rather than salmon. Or “roast chick’n” made from silken tofu or a “sizzling beefless burger” made from soy beans.
Or you could just eat the real thing which is a lot more natural than most of the products trying so hard to look and taste like it.
For instance, the Vegan Cheeseburger 2.0 has no less than 70 ingredients, including maltodextrin, xantham gum, modified starch and acetic acid. I, for one, am not buying it. I am sick of being made to feel guilty or inferior because I am a meateater. First, they want us to ditch the beef, bangers and burgers. Then the cream, butter and cheese. Then eggs and yoghurt. Soon we’ll be left only eating fruit fallen from trees that is naturally bruised.
Better that than flexitarian.