I haven’t signed into Daily Kos for awhile, although I continue to read many articles here with great interest, especially articles that discuss our future as creatures on planet Earth. It is hard not to panic or despair when seeing videos from Libya and other parts of the world suffering the extremes of climate change—thanks to all who report on these since our main stream media seems unconcerned.
I am going to attempt to write something more positive, although this article was prompted by watching the BBC documentary “Eating Our Way to Extinction” (link to YouTube version). I believe learning to eat less meat is a step in the right direction, even if one cannot totally stop eating the animal proteins. So I’ve been braving it and want to report on some experience.
I brought a crock full of Beyond Meat meatballs to a student picnic a week ago. The meatballs were the Italian variety, and so they were slow cooked in a thick marinara sauce along with peppers and onions. I brought sandwich rolls and smoked provolone along to make meatball sandwiches; much of it was devoured with nary a word about the meatballs seeming “funny” or not like regular, well, “meat”balls. Leftovers were brought home and we ate them with pasta. Seriously, you could not tell these were plant based!
Since that worked so well, I bought a pound of Beyond Beef, which is wrapped in a square box and looks just like ground beef (if you look too closely, there are some white particles in there that resemble fat but are probably ground-up beans). I mixed in some shami kebab seasoning, and used cold water to mix and shape into burger patties. Last night I made my first burger with one of the patties. To be honest, it was the best burger, hands down, that I have ever eaten! It ran with juices, and was the perfect color inside, and just, well, melted in the mouth! I could hardly believe it!
Beyond makes a variety of plant-based, all organic meat substitutes, including Beyond Beef, Beyond Sausage, and Beyond Steak. As I understand, the main ingredients are ground up legumes, and the secret sauce is what is known as “plant heme”. Plant heme looks like blood but comes from plants like beets—so it’’s good to know you can make a part of beets pleasing to a wider audience!
To finish this article, I want to get excited about a new plant-based product from a company named Plantible, based in Eldorado, Texas (Gov. Abbott, eat your heart out dude). They haven’t started to sell their products yet here where I live, but I’m keeping my eye out. What they do at Plantible is grow duckweed in huge aquariums, then they pump the duckweed into extractors that extract a plant protein called rubi. The rubi can then be added to flavorings and shaped to make almost any type of meat thingy imaginable.
Well, I know we can’t expect to high tech our way out of the coming great societal collapse. But for now I am happy to see new ideas and new ways of eating that are better for the creatures we share Earth with!