To each their own. I wouldn’t eat a veggie steak, not because of the name - but the processed nature.
A “sausage” to me doesn’t necessarily contain meat. Heck, most “normal” sausages we buy have enough fillers and additives to make me doubt they contain meat! So a vegetable sausage, made of minced veggies + fillers, that’s fine.
What I don’t like is things like facon (just eat the d@mn bacon - you will be happier from it), chick’n etc - things that “pretend” to be meat. One personal pet hatred from me is Rama cream. The amount of times I open the fridge to realise that I (or someone in the family) accidentally picked up the Rama fake-cream instead of double cream…
EDIT: and while I’m on a rant - I also dislike people telling me what I should/should not eat/do/drive/etc. - I feel like “mind your own business and leave me alone”… So maybe I’m just turning into a grumpy old git…
Simple answer, having a friend whose father was an avid hunter, from small birds to wild boar: time commitment, cost, uncertainty, and slasher aspect of dressing a kill. Plus, you never know what you’ll get. He used to say “get a youngish boar who had a big meal of wild berries and you’re in for a a treat unlike any other, get an old boar who just ate a half-rotting deer carcass and the moment the steak hits the pan you - and the whole neighbourhood - will run, while projectile vomiting”.
I’ve come to believe that the only meat that should be eaten as fresh as possible is fish and seafood, anything else - including pigs and chicken - need to hang for days, beef and mutton especially benefit from a long maturing.
Sorry for sharing some stories of my youth, I did kill and eat many animals and that is just our natural way of living.
End of the 80s somebody from Spain asked me for some bullets and a stick gun to kill pigs. My stepfather was a champion with the knife (OK, that is not why I married his daughter… is it?) but some of his nephews wanted to try out a more modern method. Poor pigs, they did not get it right! My stepfather stepped in and killed em for good (the pigs I mean of course…).
I did some hunting when I was young and for the rest I did just kill pigs. My mother in law kept pigs the whole year, always had a big pot on the fire with whatever she thought was good for them and then brought it down to the pigs. She was crying when we did kill them… and then made the best fucking chorizo I did ever eat in my live.
In Switzerland we had a little slaughter house where we would kill and prepare normally three pigs in one go. It was very prepared, rails at the roof for moving heavy parts and a place to heat hundreds of liters for the Bluetwurscht.
In Spain killing the pigs was a big fiesta, 30 people or more, “working” for two days on two pigs. Bringing dried bushes, kill them, cut off the feet, burn the hair, then open carefully (colourful view at first) to not touch the gall. Boning off the meat and then put the legs and arms into salt (one day per kilo) to get that jamon. Chop most of the meat, mixing the “bad” one to be prepared at the day and the rest into the colons which were washed at the river by the women (who would speak about their lives/villages without an end during washing them).
In Switzerland we usually killed 3-5 pigs in one morning, 3 persons. Starting early in the morning by midday we were done, including all kind of Wurscht (you will never taste a Blutwurscht better than after the first cooking, but for that you need to participate in the Metzgete…). My grandfather said he did knead more meat for “Bratwurscht” than any baker did for bread.
I get it, today almost nobody needs to hunger. In my youth however there were times we kids only got bones when there was little meat. I had to eat that much potatoes that I still don’t like them!
There’s a joke in my family about the meat of wild animals: careful with the pellets!!!
Sometimes the hunters of wild pigs are not careful enough and the best parts are full of pellets. Hopefully, that lead or rando metals are not poisoning me.
Pellets for a boar? Surely for a boar they would be using slugs? (i.e. one single heavy piece of lead, rather than many little balls that you would use for birds or smaller things)
Boar skulls are VERY thick… (hard headed you could say)
There is not much rational behind this though - if we can grow tenderloin in a way that’s literally a genetic copy of a random cow - I don’t see why I wouldn’t buy that.
People are very irrationally skeptical about food science… GMOs are also banned, despite proven track record in most of the world. We should imho use technology where it’s advantageous, not close our eyes and be puritanian naturalists (imho)
Food processing is not necessarily bad either, it depends on what exactly is processeed into what and how. Certain types of processing don’t change the nutritional value of products (like grinding meat for example), while others do change the taste, nutritional value and the health risks (brining, adding certain additives, etc.)
My very layman opinion on this is: There’s a huge hoax in the grocery/food business regarding this. Our life expectancies grow like crazy, yet we’re pretending that glyphosate (example) is soooo deadly, this and that isn’t good for your health, etc.
Meanwhile the avg. Japanese person eats lead loaded fish all the time (a lot of Tuna / sea fish) well beyond the legal recommended dose of Europe and they still live longer than we ever could. At some point, the min-maxing of food quality/health is very irrational imho
The term “Frankenfood” is a highly effective piece of anti-GMO rhetoric coined in 1992 by Boston College English professor Paul Lewis.
It refers to Frankenstein who was a fictional character consequently destroying this rhetoric for any one who thinks about it.
Ha, I’m not a guns expert. Only good appetite and open to new meat. My mother did find 1 pellet in her dish.
And…my bad use of language. It was another animal but people call them “pigs”, cute little guys. My mistake, I should call them properly : Cuniculus paca AKA tepezcuintle.
Cell culture cannot (now or in the near future) reproduce a tenderloin steak which is a complex mixture of cell types. And why go to the bother, a cow does the job on hay.
There was a lot of over the top scare mongering about GMO food. Now the issues are more economic and not just confined to GM seeds. Industrial agricultural uses more and more crops where the farmer is forced to buy new seeds each year rather than using some of the harvest for replanting.
Agreed, processing and ultra processing are not the same.
The problem with glyphosate is the extent of its use rather than any acute toxicity in humans where exposure is low. It is too easy to apply and the long term effects on the environment and humans are not well known. The compound itself is highly toxic. Bring on organic farming.
The Tuna argument is a strawman argument. It is not just lead that accumulates in fish such as Tuna. The Tuna are useful as monitor of sea pollution. The Japanese like to catch their fish these days in the relatively unpolluted water around NZ rather than off the coast of China.
@Axa. I thought that was an agouti, but I learned something before 7:30 a.m., along with @Phil_MCR’s comment on bismuth, which I thought was toxic, as it’s in Group 15 along with antimony and arsenic. So much for highschool chemistry…
I don’t get the double standards. People make a fuzz because Brazilian rainforest is cut for cattle and soja. Meanwhile, Switzerland could be a single huge forest below the tree line. Trees cut today bad, trees cut centuries ago good and a example of good care of the environment.
You can’t compare today with what was happening hundreds of years ago.
There wasn’t the knowledge then with regards to how forests and trees affected climate, locally and globally.
Forests were not only destroyed for agriculture:
In the UK, at least, all the forests of oak were cut down to build ships so Britain could have it’s empire and rule the waves.
