Five vegetarian meals (original) (raw)

At Whole Foods today, looking for interesting frozen meals, we came across whole cases full of items designed to appeal to vegetarians (or vegans). Of special interest to me, since I’m preparing some postings on the etymological fallacy, originally inspired by complaints about the expression meatless meatballs, that it was contradictory (how could balls of meat be meatless?) and therefore unacceptable. Some on-the-spot photos by Kim Darnell, starting with this example:

(#1)

This is getting a bit ahead of the story, but cooked balls of ground or chopped stuff wouldn’t have to be made of meat, and in some culinary cuisines they aren’t (think Indian koftas). What people complain about in foods like #1 is entirely an issue over the name meatball.

Then two items labeled as Vegan N, where N is a meat name:

(#2)

(#3)

Here you can complain about the name, but you can also be uneasy about the attempt to create foods that look like traditional hunks of meat: a roast turkey, a cured leg of pork. Granted, they’re sliced, but they’re still conceptualized as standard meats (and, presumably, flavored so as to imitate turkey and ham, respectively).

Next, an entry that doesn’t pretend to mimic any specific meat, but is a generic “grain meat”, though it’s presented as an awful lot like a stuffed turkey roll:

(#4)

Finally, an item whose name, for a change, is not apparently oxymoronic — in fact, the name Chickenless Nuggets is supposed to count as truth in advertising — but whose appearance is a direct steal from a meat item, namely chicken nuggets. In turn, chicken nuggets are either (in the old-fashioned variant you can make at home) pieces of chicken breast, breaded or battered, then deep-fried or baked; or (in the fast-food variant) shaped dollops of meat slurry treated this way. In any case, they’re recognizable meat items, and Chickenless Nuggets look juat like them:

(#5)

Chicken nuggets are almost entirely a textural experience, bland in taste, with just a hint of chicken (primarily achieved by herbs, I think) — something easily mimicked with beans and tofu.

But of course ground or chopped legumes and tofu, merely shaped into balls, sticks, patties, or whatever, won’t reproduce the experience of eating meat, which is what Chickenless Nuggets aspire to do.

This entry was posted on October 31, 2016 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Etymological Fallacy, Language and food, Names, Oxymoron. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.