Recently, self the loser tried a minor culinary self-experiment, namely my first direct supermarket consumer experience with faux meat products, in the vein of the Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods line of synthetic meat products rather than Boca Burgers, for example. Namely, 3CM tried the Beyond Meat faux-sausage product for the first time. It tasted OK, rather like actual meat sausage, which is the point of the product, after all, to get meat-eaters to convert over from eating meat to eat less meat, at least. I'd heard about Impossible Foods a while back, and the Impossible Burger, even though I didn't go to Burger King to try out the Impossible Whopper when it got road-tested in STL.
Being a loser, the one-time experiment hasn't taken in the long run, for reasons none of which are moral at all. This starts from the reason that I bought the Beyond Sausage item in the first place. It wasn't for moral reasons like to try to reduce my meat consumption. The reason was that it was in the meat section of the supermarket where they put meat products with approaching sell-by dates. To compound the irony and looseness, I stocked up on actual meat products from the same section where that Beyond Sausage package was sitting. I froze all the items for future cooking. They do keep, after all, since those products don't suddenly become uncookable at 12:01 AM on the day after their sell-by date. So on the one hand, 3CM hasn't really cut back his meat consumption, which we all need to do to kill the planet more slowly.
I vaguely remember a quote somewhere by Patrick Brown, the founder of Impossible Foods, to the effect that if he could get rid of one species to save the planet, it would be cows, because of the greenhouse gases that they emit collectively, particularly methane, and presumably of all the land that humans despoil in order to raise cattle for eventual slaughter and consumption. However, I haven't been able to trace the exact source of that thought from Brown. In fairness, and more precisely, I did find this interview by The Guardian with Brown, with a different quote, where he doesn't go so far as to advocate removing cows entirely from the planet:
Q: “Is your ultimate ambition to bring an end to the need for livestock?”
A: "The ultimate goal is to develop a way to produce all the foods we [traditionally] get from animals much more sustainably using scalable ingredients from plants and make these foods delicious, nutritious and affordable.
If we succeed completely in that there would obviously still be cows, pigs and chickens but they would not be a significant part of the food system but kept around because they are interesting creatures."
Separately, and this is where the Lemuel Gulliver side of 3CM comes to the fore, in all honesty, self the loser disagrees with the idea that cows are the one species that needs to go away. To wit:
* Cows don’t cut down trees wantonly in the Amazon and everywhere else.
* Cows don’t pollute the oceans with plastic.
* Cows don't drive cars thoughtlessly without a care for how much cheap gasoline costs the environment.
* Cows don't engage in ethnic cleansing, racism, and misogyny.
* Cows don't claim to oppose Traitor Drumpf, and then refuse to vote for the only other POTUS ballot candidate who could have defeated him for the Presidency, leading to the current daily mess of the world, without acknowledgement of their responsibility in causing said daily mess.
* Cows don't vote to leave the European Union based on xenophobia, and then can't admit their mistake once the consequences become apparent, and are unable to move to reverse the mistake.
And so on. In short, cows don’t eat the planet unsustainably while thinking to themselves one of the most dangerous 3-word sentiments ever: “God will provide”.
With that, time for the standard SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories for the week….