“Where’s the beef?” Redux
And now for some real fake news…
Or, should I say, real news of the fake.
Coming soon to a bun near you -- the guaranteed meat-free Whopper®. Yup, Burger King announced that no cows have been harmed to produce the signature sandwiches coming off the conveyor at more than 50 of their St. Louis area outlets. Old Bossy’s mortal remains have been replaced by a high-tech crypto-patty of non-zoologic origin flavored with a proprietary concoction involving beet juice and synthetic hemoglobin, a buck’s tacked onto the purchase price and Missouri vegans can revel in one of fast food’s penultimate pleasures all the while maintaining a sense of moral elevation over the speciesist meat-munchers two booths over.
Ain’t progress wunnerful?
Uhhh, often times not.
Ok, full disclosure time. I like to eat cattle. I also have a pretty much insatiable appetite for pigs, chickens, turkeys, young sheep, an amazing variety of swimming creatures, deer, bunny rabbits, squirrel, pheasants, geese, and, oh, the list goes on and on. It’s a proclivity I share with most folks, and even those who eschew the birds of the air and beasts of the field clearly find temptation in their tender bits – let tofurkey and the burgerless burger stand in evidence of that. Meat, fish and fowl just flat out taste good in a deep-down primordial way, and even though the wonder Whopper taste-testers claim they couldn’t taste a difference between the genuine and the simulacrum I harbor doubt.
Ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, pickle and onion may mask a multitude of sins.
And even if the claim is substantially accurate, I have to wonder, why?
Why devote multi-billions of 21st century technology to darn-near duplicate what a cow’s rump mastered eons ago? Nobody had a beef with the taste of beef.
One hundred-fifty years ago nobody had a beef with butter either. In fact, there wasn’t enough of it. To make up for that, Emperor Napoleon III of France offered a prize to anyone who could make a satisfactory butter alternative that could be palmed off to the armed forces and lower classes. The subsequent triumph of French gastronomie took beef tallow and transformed it into oleomargarine – which after a century and a half of heavy duty marketing still hasn’t succeeded in buttering up the buying public to the point they really can’t believe it’s not butter…
Such is the burden of the ersatz. Just read the word “imitation” and most folks rightly know that somewhere out there is a real thing, the thing they really want, but at least for the moment and for some reason, can’t have.
Sometimes that reason is pretty clear. During the war, Germans drank ersatz coffee made from a variety of brown-roasted plant substances, but no sooner were the Nazis fleeing to South America than Deutchlanders were back pouring a genuine Brazilian brew.
But that reversion to the real may prove the exception. As generations who have grown up on Kool-Aid, Popsicles and Jello will attest, the cherry we’ve grown up tasting is a flavor not to be found in any tree-borne fruit ripened in the sunlight. Even the strictest of vegans indulge their furnishings with the hyde of the industrially farmed Nauga. We stock our shelves with Krabb, and Koffee Kreemer. Tang never spoils and BacO’s are kosher. Our plastic plants never die and a spritz and a spray fills the house with the scent of lilacs as the blizzard blows on.
And we’re promised a future of virtual reality guided by artificial intelligence, paid for, one may assume, with fool’s gold.
No doubt we’ll be assured that, just like a beefless Whopper, we won’t be able to tell it from the real thing.