My Year Without Meat

by Richard Cornish

  Politically speaking, the overt eating of meat had been a twentieth-century affirmation of the right to freedom. Even a right-wing affair. At Meatopia 2012 the confluence of ethical meat and celebratory feasting on it converged, mingling the right wing with the left. The red with the blue. So at the end of the day, the right to eat as much meat as you want, as long as it is raised ethically, paints those who cling to those beliefs a strange shade of purple.

  In the hipster gift shop I picked up a jigsaw puzzle box. On it was a landscape made from meat. There were hills in the distance made from ham, a pancetta waterfall cascading into a bacon lake. By its shores sat a wiener log cabin shaded by mortadella trees and corn dog shrubs. It was a grotesque meat-based pastiche with a nod to the fantasy works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a Flemish Renaissance painter who created The Land of Cockaigne, a Reformation predecessor of ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’. Both are fantasy lands of plentiful food everywhere, where there is no need for work, as the very fabric of the earth is edible. In Bruegel’s work a peasant, a soldier and a cleric are asleep under a tree, the fences to the fields are made of interwoven sausages, a pig runs about with a knife in its back ready to slice away the flesh, a cottage is thatched with pies, and loaves of bread form themselves into a shrubbery. Bruegel painted in a time of frequent famine and major social, religious and political upheaval. The smallgoods-landscape jigsaw puzzle, executed in photoshop, was presumably an ironic reminder of excess and surplus. It had been reduced from $35 to $8.

  Outside I wandered past the Soulfood Café. There was a noticeable difference. It was quieter, not as cluttered. I wandered in and looked at the menu. It was breakfast time and there was ham and eggs on the menu. Ethically sourced meat had made its way into one of the great bastions of vegetarianism. ‘Times have changed,’ said the waitress. ‘Smith Street has changed so much. So we had to move with the times.’ After more than a decade, this meat-free café had sold its soul.

  FAUX PAS

  A vegetarian acquaintance who was aware of my previous predilection for flesh suggested I try a Chinese restaurant that specialised in mock meat. Squashed into what had once been an office furniture showroom near the casino, the restaurant was lit by clammy green fluorescent light. Only the chopsticks on the table and Chinese vases on dark wooden furniture gave a touch of Oriental hospitality. Michael Bublé crooned through the house PA. The big band backing and live crowd sounded small and tinny. On a plate in front of me was a bowl of shark’s fin soup. Faux shark’s fin soup. Just like the sesame prawn toast served next, it was a fake. As was the barbecued pork and braised ginger duck. Every dish in this Chinese vegetarian restaurant was fake.

  Not a forgery or an interpretation, but fakes. The maker had studied the originals and then done everything in their power to reproduce them. Except the bit about meat. It was like a perfectly reproduced version of Monet’s waterlilies, with every brushstroke placed in exactly the same place on the canvas. Except once it was in the mouth, you realised the forger was using acrylic paint instead of oils.

  According to the restaurant’s mantra published on its website, it serves strictly vegetarian food based on mock meat. It explains that the restaurant’s mock-meat products are ‘intended to broaden the vegetarian dining experience and encourage those who would like to make the transition to a meatless lifestyle, without necessarily giving up the taste and texture’ of meat. Mock meat is actually a range of soy proteins and wheat gluten that has been flavoured, coloured and textured to resemble different flesh. The visible likeness is uncanny. With suspension of disbelief, you could almost be forgiven for mistaking it for the real thing. Almost. Just like the waxworks in Madame Tussauds almost look like the flesh-and-blood creatures they are modelled on.

  The concept of mock meat is not new. It is ancient. Early Chinese emperors were required to eschew meat for seven weeks every year prior to taking part in prayers to ensure the prosperity of the kingdom. Over time his chefs created a repertoire of dishes that resembled the meaty original but were made with other substances that resembled flesh, both visually, texturally and flavour-wise. The techniques have survived and are kept alive by Buddhist monks, some of whom still cook from scratch. There are huge businesses in Asia based on the production of mock meat.

  A journey around health-food shops and grocers put me face to face with what to me were novel foods. Naturally I had to taste them and find out how they were made. Some of the faux flesh is made with tofu. This is a food-manufacturing technique that is over 2000 years old. Soybeans are cooked in water to make a milk. A coagulant is added and the protein clumps together to form curd. The curd is pressed to remove liquid and you’re left with tofu that can be flavoured and formed into different shapes.

  Then there is TVP. Sounds like an Eastern European fast train, but it is actually textured vegetable protein. This is a beige substance made from the material left over from soybeans once they have been processed for oil extraction. The fibre and protein is turned into a slurry and heated to 200 degrees Celsius to denature the proteins. It’s extruded through a nozzle and when it hits the air the change in pressure makes it expand to become a light, spongy material. It can be formed into different shapes, and flavoured with stuff that makes it yummy—generally, vegetable extracts and amino acids. Because of its low cost of production and long shelf life in its dehydrated form, it is used in the fast-food industry to bulk out processed meats.

  One of the products made from soy that I was enticed to buy was mock bacon. Still wary that real bacon could be my downfall, I searched out an ersatz vegan bacon not so much to eat but so as simply to know it existed in case I had a bout of post-carnivore bacon cravings. I found a product we will call VegO Bacon Ham. It came in a simple plastic vacuum-sealed bag—two pre-sliced blocks of square matter that looked like pink luncheon ham complete with fat-like flecks of white. It was heavy and moist like processed pork, and the bag, when sliced open, revealed a slightly smoky aroma incompletely concealing a smell vaguely similar to that of a tyre showroom. Moist and meaty in the mouth, the texture was almost exactly the same as defrosted frozen bacon. The aroma coming up the back of the mouth into the nostrils was vaguely meaty, but it was more like opening the box of a spare tube when fixing a puncture on a bike. The tongue and mouth were saying meat but the olfactory system was screaming, ‘OIL SPILL! OIL SPILL! PETROCHEMICAL ALERT!’ It was as if the VegO Bacon Ham had been 3D-printed by a computer—the programmers had spent all their time getting the texture and look right, and when it came to flavour, they simply inserted the code for thongs.

  The concept that soy-based meat-free meat substitutes are a step towards upward moral mobility is entrenched in the advertising and marketing of these products. The next bacon I tried was branded VegeFarm but when I looked up the company’s location on a satellite map, I saw the VegeFarm is in a modern industrial estate in Gueishan, Taiwan. The ingredients list read that the bacon was made from soy protein, a protein often isolated from the residue of soy meal after the extraction of oil. Next is whey protein, a byproduct of cheesemaking or from milk processing. It also contains canola oil, starch and glucomannan, a sticky starch-like polysaccharide derived from the roots of a tropical plant. The next ingredient is curdlan. This is a polymer of glucose, or lots of glucose molecules joined together that when heated form a water-retaining gel. Curdlan is made from a bacteria, often found in the human body, responsible for urinary tract infections. My bacon ham also contained salt, sugar, a substance called ‘vegetable seasoning’ and another called ‘vegetarian essence’. ‘Vegetarian essence’, I can reassure you, is made from hydrolysed vegetable protein and not actual vegetarians. The lovely pink tinge of my bacon ham comes from FD & C Red#40. This is a red food dye derived from petro chemicals, banned in several countries and not recommend for children in the European Union. But not one animal died in its making.

  Millions of living cells died, however, to make my Quorn fajita strips. Moist, spongy and coated in a sweet, faintly perfumed coati
ng, these meat-free pieces of food were made from mycoprotein derived from a fungus called Fusarium venenatum. If you concentrate, it does taste vaguely mushroomy, like the blandest of camembert. Quorn was born in the 1960s at the same time the green revolution was kicking in. The green revolution is the name given to the transfer of industrial, technical, chemical and organisational practices from industry to agriculture after World War I. This saw the reorganisation of land use across Europe, North America, Australasia and parts of Asia from small-scale food production to more broad-scale, mechanised production that exponentially increased food production. Quorn was envisaged by British industrialist J Arthur Rank, the same man who formed the Rank film production company. He instructed his team at milling and baking company Rank Hovis McDougall to investigate making high-protein food for humans from fungus. At that time there was a serious burgeoning global food supply problem, with demand outweighing supply, and the threat of widespread food shortages. Rank Hovis McDougall, together with Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), isolated Fusarium venenatum from the soil where it grows as a white spiderweb-like filament. It was grown in fermenting tanks on a solution of glucose derived from corn and essential minerals, with the fungus filtered out in a continuous process. Early production success was met with regulatory suspicion. Some types of Fusarium produced mycotoxins (mushroom poisons) so it took until the mid-1980s for the mycoprotein derived from this safe version of Fusarium to be approved for human consumption. Blended with egg white and other compounds for flavour and texture, the product was ready for the market. Except the market was not ready for it. It took until the mid-1990s, and the personal intervention of businessman Lord Sainsbury, for it to be listed on British supermarket shelves. It rolled out across the globe, only arriving in Australia in 2010. Quorn’s moist sponginess and flavour, added as an afterthought, make it appealing to those who are truly hungry.

  More convincing, however, are the mock meats made from wheat gluten. You’ll understand what wheat gluten is if you have ever tried to clean cooking utensils after making bread. If you soak a mixing bowl with a little leftover bread dough in it, the water will wash away the starch while leaving the more tenacious gluten. Gluten is formed by wheat proteins that come together to form big, long strands as you knead the dough. Try to scrub gluten strands off and they do their best to form more elastic and rubbery shapes and forms. When thin sheets of the gluten are laid one on top of each other, they not only stick together but also do a reasonable job of looking like layers of muscle found in duck breasts. When the gluten has Chinese five-spice, ginger and ‘vegetarian seasoning’ added to it, the flavours begin to align with braised duck. Marinate the stuff in soy sauce and its dark amino acids take it from pallid beige to pleasing deep brown. Give it some time on hot metal with a little oil and, in a certain light, it could be braised duck. The same process is used to make mock chicken, abalone, beef and lamb.

  The process of refining protein from wheat is not unique to Asia. In the south of Lebanon during the annual mouneh, or harvest month, in autumn, women, mainly, go about harvesting and curing food to last over winter. This is a time when sausages are fermented and smoked, olives are picked and brined and wheat cheese is made. This is made from wheat dough that is washed of its starch, with the gluten rolled into balls and dried like Lebanese shanklish cheese. These balls are then stored, with herbs, in olive oil. I learned about this from the man who ran the farmers’ market in Beirut, Lebanon. Kamal Mouzawak explained to me by phone how the women in the south of the country made ‘vegan cheese’ every autumn, but in some areas close to the border with Israel, the thousands-of-years-old tradition had stopped in recent years, due to the last Israeli incursion. Although I have never eaten ‘vegan cheese’ from Lebanon, I have eaten some other wheat-based vegetarian foods.

  One was a gourmet meat-free mince with a delicious-looking image on the cardboard cover of the box of a nest of creamy white spaghetti mounted with a chunky tomato and onion rich sauce. I slid out the clear plastic box inside to reveal a mass of what looked like engorged Weeties. Brown amorphous flakes of ‘delicious, mouthwatering alternative to meat’. This stuff was made from both soy and wheat gluten, vegetable oil, soy protein, textured wheat protein, ground flax, natural flavouring, salt, malt extract, dried yeast, unrefined sugar, carrageenan, zinc sulphate and vitamin B6. Similar to what I imagine Soylent Green looks like, it is made in the same Midlands industrial estate in the United Kingdom as Avon cosmetics and Aquascutum coats.

  The brown not-meat had a friend on the shelf that, judging by the packet, was going to give me a fish experience similar to any UK Friday-night dinner in front of the telly. Without the fish. Meat-free fish fingers, chips and peas. These ‘meat-free fish style fingers’ captured the experience of factory-processed crumbed fish extremely well, replicating the golden crumb and moist interior that, although made of soy protein, still managed to taste like the way a fish-processing facility smells. It’s amazing what they can do with food these days.

  Despite Quorn, TVP and food made from soy and other vegetable products marketing themselves as happy meat-free, soy-free alternatives, they are, at their very heart, still factory food. And because the process hides the origin, they evoke my suspicion. Quorn, for example, takes a traditional non-food species into factories and breeds them up to form a medium to which flavours and textures are added to make it palatable. It is then pressed into forms that resemble foods we know. Quorn and other non-meat proteins like tofu, textured vegetable protein and wheat gluten mock meats are formed into meat-like shapes to resemble sausages, bacon, ham, salami. Because they undergo this unnatural transformation, many people trust them as they would trust any shapeshifter. Shapeshifters are archetypes from mythology. From Gilgamesh to werewolves to terrifying sci-ficreatures such as the bad cop in Terminator, they instil in us a fear and suspicion of things that have been transformed from one thing to resemble another. And despite how much the manufacturers try to make mock meats look like the fleshy, platonic ideal, they are destined to fail because of the high expectation they set up for the food to taste like the real thing. Vegan sausages. Tofurky. Quorn chicken-style nuggets. These are simply meat-free analogues of flesh fast food. They are fodder for the food illiterate, people who have never learned to cook, people who were taught that food will fall from the factory conveyor belt into their mouths as long as their mouths and wallets are open.

  Mock meats truly frighten me. They are marketed with names expressing freedom and enlightenment, yet in reality are hallmarks that the diner has given up all sovereignty to understanding cooking and food, and enslaved themselves further and deeper to the industrial complex.

  Back in the Chinese restaurant, my dish of mock Malaysian lamb curry had arrived. The blocks of mock lamb were commendably artful in their mimicry of real chunks of lamb shoulder, right down to individual stray fibres of vegetable protein sticking out of the stuff. This was sitting in a lovely grey-brown slurry with a pool of red oil floating on top. It reminded me of every Malaysian lamb curry I had ever eaten. It was curry, but not as we know it. The star protein was an impostor. As I dipped the roti bread into the sauce, Michael Bublé continued his polished croon.

  7

  Meat Eaters from Outer Space

  Out in Central Victoria, nestled along the Goulburn River, is the historic town of Murchison. It is quite a beautiful little town that has had a long association with incarceration. Nearby was an Aboriginal protectorate, another name for a concentration camp, for the Goulburn Valley Aboriginal people. One of them, King Charles Tattambo, is buried in the local cemetery, on a small ridge slightly elevated above the local settlers. His brass nameplate has been soldered to his grave. Across the cemetery is an ossuary, a stone building that looks as if it would be more at home in the mountains above Milan than Murchison. This is the final resting place for the bones of Italian prisoners of the prisoner-of-war camps that dotted the countryside during World War II.

  Just off Murchison’s main drag
is the Murchison and District Historical Society Museum, housed in a nondescript brown brick building that somehow reminds me of Chocolate Ripple Biscuits. Inside sits a piece of coal-black rock safely secured in a thick glass case. On loan from the Chicago Field Museum, it is a 400-gram shard that broke off from a meteorite that exploded above the town and surrounding farmland one Sunday morning in 1969. ‘We were getting ready for church,’ remembered Robyn Trickey. Her memories are recorded in documents in the museum. ‘We went outside to see what we thought was a jet aeroplane. The dogs were barking in the kennel. The cows came running home.’ There was a roar outside that some said sounded like a bushfire, or a jet engine breaking through the sound barrier. Those outside looked up to see a smoke trail following a bright light in the sky. The meteorite broke up in the lower atmosphere, showering the district with lumps of black rock. Despite nearly 100 kilograms of rock hitting the earth at supersonic speed, the only casualties were a tree branch, a piece of corrugated iron and a handrail in a milking shed.

  The Trickey family kept their piece under a glass dome. Every time they lifted the dome they were struck by a strong smell, like that of methylated spirits. There was something inside the Murchison meteorite, the black rock covered in a hardened molten skin, that was drawing scientists from Melbourne, then Sydney, then all over the world. Quietly they would arrive at weekends, when people were at home, and ask if they had any of the meteorite or if they could scour their land to find some. ‘The locals didn’t understand the significance of what had landed on the town,’ Kay Ball, president of the Murchison and District Historical Society, told me. ‘So everyone innocently handed the shards of rock, some weighing well over several kilograms, over to the visitors.’ Within months almost every shard of the rock had been quietly whisked away to laboratories across the globe. The scientists were breaking down the meteorite to find out exactly what was inside it. What they discovered rocked the scientific world and provided evidence for a new theory: Life On Earth Originated In Outer Space.