Find more newsletters with opinions and recipes here. If you want to take issue, please Comment.
A decade or so ago, I went in search of ant egg soup, as one does. When a person has eaten snake, guinea pig, urchin (sea, not street), cockroaches, dog (unknowingly) and stewed pears (with great reluctance), ant egg soup seemed a fair project to pursue. Along with the challenge of wanting to eat it at all, you have to spoon it down before the ants escape over the side of the bowl.
In SouthEast Asia, an abundance of bugs and vermin is readily available as dinner. At every bus and ferry terminus, women hover bearing aloft woven trays the circumference of a bicycle wheel. Mounded with soy-fried insects, these are the trays that interior designers in the west load with artfully curated collections and a scented candle.
On either side of the lumpy road that the cheapest bus trundles along from Siem Reap in Cambodia to the Thai border, the land is flat and given over to rice paddies. Women hunker down among the lizard-green blades of the burgeoning crop, trapping some sludge-slithering creature to transform into a traveller’s temptation.
They grill it, brushed with sauce, in small cubes on skewers over tiny charcoal braziers at the roadside. By the time the meat is cooked, you can’t identify it. It is rat. Rat does not taste like chicken.
The day I sat down at Tamarind in Luang Prebang, ant egg soup wasn’t on the menu. The chef needed 24 hours’ warning to hike out into the countryside and beat up an ant hill with sticks. Caroline Gaylard, co-owner of the restaurant with her husband and chef Joy Ngueamboupha, shrugged, unimpressed by my interest. “They’re only another thing to eat, and insects are just sitting there.”
Insects are regular household fare in SouthEast Asia. Meals may include spiders, grasshoppers, silkworms, and more. Fat spiders, caught in holes, are eaten like tiger prawns. You tear off their legs and carapace and suck out the juicy flesh. Maggots? Gaylard guffaws. “Maggots are a sign something’s off!”
I’ve eaten maggots - in a goat’s cheese in France that sidled across the plate as I swallowed my first mouthful.
Anyone who is abandoning this description to throw up should take a look at the videos out there of the conditions in which we in the developed world raise cattle (and pigs and chickens) on an industrial scale. Insects roam free - pre-lunch, at least.
In what used to be known evocatively as Indochina, meat traditionally is used as a flavouring only, in minute quantity. With the west looking seriously at the effect of the red meat industry on the environment, on global warming, on cardiovascular health, alternatives under the microscope include the farming of insects.
But we’re generally of a squeamish nature. If we’re prepared to reduce our meat intake at all, it’s more likely we’ll take less reluctantly to the competing developments feverishly under way of plant-based alternatives designed to look as well as taste like meat.
$3.1 billion globally was invested in 2020 in plant-based protein alternatives to meat, eggs and dairy, three times the investment of the previous year, according to the Good Food Institute.
Plant-based meat has overtaken lab-grown meat in popularity, although Singapore has just approved for sale something scrumptious by US company Eat Just seductively titled ‘cultivated chicken ingredient’. It’s the first country in the world to do so. Eat Just thinks it will get regulatory approval in Europe within two years.
Part of lab-grown meat’s appeal is as a solution to the environmental issues attached to animal agriculture. But a 2019 Oxford University study found that if the electricity to produce it is provided by fossil fuels, it will equal the carbon footprint of conventional meat production. And if the cells are fed the soy, wheat or corn associated in the production of conventional meat with deforestation, lab-grown meat’s environmental credentials come into question.
No, Kermit. It’s definitely not easy being green.
Market leaders in plant-based meat alternatives are US-based Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. Sold in 112,000 US outlets, the former is expanding into 1000 stores in Germany and 1140 in Austria, following a 49% increase in Europe in two years. Its products will soon be available in 445 of the UK’s retail stores. In the meat aisle.
Burger King adopted Impossible Foods’ patty as its newest Whopper burger. Given the average American ate 222.4 pounds of red meat in 2018 - the equivalent of 890 quarter-pounders, or 2.4 burgers a day, according to the USDA - it’s to be hoped Burger King shoves it hard.
Not everyone in the ‘alt-meat’ business is impressed. In August last year, Lightlife Foods, a competing producer of plant-based foods, took a whole page ad in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to rail against both companies’ “hyper-processed ingredients, GMOs, unnecessary additives and fillers, and fake blood”. Describing itself as a “real food company”, it announced Lightlife Foods would be “making a clean break from…‘food tech’ companies that attempt to mimic meat at any cost.”
The companies rebutted the claims, dismissing Lightlife’s letter as a “disingenuous, desperate disinformation campaign attempting to cast doubt on the integrity of [their] products.”
If nothing else, the battle is a confirmation that non-meat alternatives have come miles since the days of the nut roast. (Creators of that sustenance could surely find a new market consulting with the building industry over its eco-friendly potential as insulation.)
What is curious is that producers of plant-based foods consider it a plus to market their creations as facsimiles of products they’re not. The description of a burger as ‘alt-meat’ conveys a whiff of apology that it’s a stand-in for the real thing.
But it is the real thing, just not the same real thing.
Why not boast? Start with fresh marketing and tell it like it is. Drop the fey names, comparisons and associations with meat, diary and eggs designed to seduce. Come up with the kind of promotion that once successfully persuaded the doubting west that a sliver of raw fish draped over a pellet of compressed cold rice made for a mouth-watering office boxed lunch.
In the meanwhile, which of the key players in plant-based food developments rises to the top depends not on diatribes in the press but, like every other food and restaurant launch, on the quality of the product. The consumers will judge.
Tarte Tatin is just as good made with vegetables as it is with the original apples. Onions make a really ‘meaty’ version.
50g/4 tablespoons/2 oz butter
2 tablespoons oil
2 teaspoons sugar
4-5 red onions, peeled and cut in half through their circumference
leaves from 6 sprigs fresh thyme
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
salt and freshly ground black pepper
100g/⅓ cup/3 oz firm chalky goat’s cheese
Pastry, bought shortcrust
Handful rocket/arugula leaves
Preheat oven to 170C/325F.
Over low heat, melt the butter with the oil in a heavy-bottomed sauté pan that can go in the oven. When the fat sizzles, take it off the heat, sprinkle in the sugar and pack the onions cut side down in the hot oil. If there are any gaps between the onions, cut up one of the halves to fill the gaps tightly. Cover the pan, return to the lowest heat to brown gently and sweat for 10-15 minutes.
Shake the pan gently to loosen the onions, lift the cover, sprinkle over the thyme, vinegar, salt and pepper, then re-cover, shake again, and place in the oven for 45 minutes till the onions have softened and the liquid has evaporated. With an oven glove, remove the pan and test onions for softness with the point of a knife. If significant liquid remains in the bottom of the onion pan, place it uncovered over a medium-low heat and reduce it until only a little thick syrup remains, shaking the pan every now and then to prevent the onions from sticking.
Raise the heat of the oven to 180C/375F.
Let the pan cool until you can touch it then lay the pastry over, rolled out 5cm/2 ins larger than the circumference of the pan so it covers the onions and hangs over the sides of the pan. Tuck the excess pastry edge back under itself so it now fits the pan. Press the edges down lightly to seal the tarte. Pierce the pastry here and there with a fork so the steam can escape. (All this can be done well ahead.)
Bake until crisp and golden, 30-40 minutes. Wearing an oven glove, remove the pan from the oven, run a knife round the edge of the pastry to release it from the pan and set aside to cool for 10 minutes. Place a serving plate slightly larger than the size of the pan over the top of the tarte. Put your hand firmly on the plate and flip pan and plate upside down so the tarte is turned onion-side up onto the plate. Crumble over the goat’s cheese and serve with a salad of rocket/arugula dressed with a mustardy vinaigrette.
No, Kermit. It’s definitely not easy being green.....LMAO...now why is Bill Gates investing so much in green....
Lovely to be reminded of the Tamarind restaurant though my own forays there were far less adventurous. So agree with you about the nonsense of naming of meat substitutes. And the idea that they too don’t consume large quantities of water and land.