Do Vegetarians Eat Animal Crackers?

Look in the grocery store freezer section, and you’ll find any number of faux meat products: Boca burgers, fakin’ bacon, chicken’ nuggets, and more. Most are made of soy, and they are designed to have a similar texture, color, and appearance to the meat they are mimicking. These products can be easily substituted into meat-based meals and recipes. For many people unfamiliar with a vegetarian diet, these are the kinds of vegetarian foods that first come to mind. A diet of substitutions is an unobtrusive way to follow a vegetarian diet in an omnivore-based society. Countless plant-based protein sources exist. A vegetarian diet can look very different from a conventional diet, with “strange” foods like tofu and teff grains. These foods aren’t created for people trying to avoid meat. They are simply food. But as food scientists get cleverer, and vegetarianism evolves, the line blurs between what is a meat substitute, and what is a stand-alone food.  Tofu has been a staple in China for over 2,000 years. It never had to be associated with an animal, until products like tofurky emerged. The humble chickpea was cultivated in the Middle East 7,500 years ago, well before anyone thought to mix it into a chick’n salad (Philologos). A diet of substitutions is ultimately an ineffective way to create change, but the difference between a “food substitute” and “real food” is blurry or non-existent.

Substitution is an oversimplified way of creating change, and it does not result in much change at all. Switching out real chicken for fake chicken does not require drastic changes to a person’s diet or lifestyle, and it doesn’t solve the broader problems of environmental sustainability or animal welfare. This is similar to the way industrial organic farms operate. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan says that industrial organic farms don’t look any different from conventional farms. As Pollan writes, “In many respects the same factory model is at work in both fields, but for every chemical input used in the farm’s conventional fields, a more benign organic input has been substituted in the organic ones” (159).  The result is a large-scale farming operation dubbed “big organic.” This type of farming does not necessarily use less fossil fuel, or maintain better soil health than conventional farming methods. The food fits the current definition of “organic” because it is produced without pesticides, but it has lost the original, complex meaning of the term rooted in the 1960s, which had to do with a cooperative society and interconnectedness.

Similarly, a vegetarian diet of substitutions ends up compromising many of the ideas behind the diet. There are three main reasons people chose a vegetarian diet: for health, for the environment, and for the animals. The problem with processed meat substitutes, is that they don’t adhere to the values associated with any of these reasons. Meat substitutes are not very healthy. They are often high in fat and sodium, low in vitamins, and contain many artificial chemicals, preservatives, and flavor enhancers that attempt to make the food taste like meat. They are not environmentally friendly, because they use a lot of resources in processing, packaging, storage, and transport. In Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Camille points out that “people who are not strict vegetarians will find more options in their local-food scene” (98). She explains that sometimes, it is more environmentally friendly to eat local meat than to eat meat substitutes. The issue of a vegetarian diet for animal rights is even more complicated.

It is true that no chickens died in the making of that chick’n nugget. This is a good thing if you are against the mistreatment of farm animals, or if you think that it is immoral to kill animals for food. If either is true for you, it seems like eating a chick’n nugget is a more morally sound act than eating an actual chicken. But this is complicated by the fact that the chick’n nugget is mimicking animal flesh. It may even be possible to close your eyes, and imagine you are eating a chicken nugget made out of real chicken. If this is the case, is the act of eating the nugget really a morally sound? Eating a soy chick’n nugget requires a kind of forgetting; a deliberate ignorance. It requires the consumer to forget about how the food was actually made. It is the same kind of forgetting that consumers practice when they eat meat-based nuggets.

It’s a running joke that vegetarians don’t eat animal crackers. When you think about it, there’s something violent about biting the head off of a zebra cracker. For someone who believes in treating animals kindly, it’s a bit of a paradox. Eating animal crackers requires forgetting. You don’t think about the animal that you are consuming. If you consider the living creature that the zebra cracker represents, the act becomes macabre. Similarly, eating fake meat requires forgetting about the animal it tries to represent. This forgetting is exactly what the vegetarian diet seeks to avoid.

It’s even more complicated, because soy chick’n nuggets are a substitution of a substitution. The original chicken nugget, made from “real” chicken, is a boneless, breaded substitute for the actual animal. Pollan called it “[m]ore like an abstraction than a full-fledged food, an idea of chicken waiting to be fleshed out” (112). A soy nugget isn’t really trying to mimic chicken, it’s trying to mimic the nugget. In fact, it’s probably difficult to create a realistic plant-based substitute for chicken. Luckily, the ideas around the chicken nugget are rooted in shape, texture, color, and accompanying ingredients, so a nugget is easy to mimic, even if the plant-based invention doesn’t taste much like chicken. But every chicken-based food is thought of in terms of characteristics such as color and texture. There are vegetarian products that mimic roast chicken, chicken tenders, grilled chicken strips, and chicken salad, which all draw on these associations. There is no original food to fall back on. It’s hard to chastise meat substitutes when the original meat product is a series of substitutes itself.

Processed meat substitutes are strange in that they lack a history. There were no women in seventeenth-century Italy eating MorningStar sausage on the mountainside. Processed meat substitutes are made possible due to modern technology, and they are created specifically for people trying to eat vegetarian meals. Pollan partially blames America’s lack of culinary history for what he calls the “national eating disorder,” or the difficulty Americans have in choosing what to eat. Pollan says “The lack of a steadying culture of food leaves us especially vulnerable to the blandishments of the food scientists and the marketer” (5). Meat substitutes, which are almost entirely without history, are especially vulnerable.

The chickpea chick’n salad does have a history. People have been mixing chickpeas with vegetables for a long time. But the modern day chicken salad is said to have originated in Rhode Island in 1863 (Willow Tree), and a chickpea chick’n salad didn’t emerge until much later. The strange thing about the recipe below, is that the chickpeas don’t try very hard to mimic chicken. In fact, the recipe is as simple as taking a conventional recipe for chicken salad, and swapping out chickpeas for chicken. The recipe doesn’t mimic chicken, it mimics the entire salad, complete with the mayonnaise base and the crunchy vegetables. The resulting flavor is distinct from chicken salad.

Chick’n salad has a glorious name, because it suggests blurring the line between substitutes and “real food.” The word chickpea contains the word “chick,” which is in the title of the recipe. At the same time, it draws attention to the chicken-based salad with a similar name. The result is what I like to think of as a distinct food, even though the recipe owes its history to chicken.

Below is a vegetarian recipe for chick’n salad that very obviously practices substitution. When you eat it, feel free to close your eyes and pretend that it’s chicken (or at least your imaginary idea of what chicken is). Or, don’t think of chicken at all, and appreciate the way a delicious chickpea can blend with other flavors and textures. Either way, it creates textures, colors, flavors, and ideas that don’t require chicken or chickpeas. It’s a substitution for an imaginary idea, just like every food in existence.

Works Cited

Kingsolver, Camille. “Eating My Sister’s Chickens.” Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara

Kingsolver, Harper, 2007, pp. 97-99.

Philologos. “Chickpeas.” Forward Association,  2005.  http://forward.com/articles/2119/

chickpeas. Accessed 16 May 2017.

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Penguin, 2006.

Willow Tree Farm. “Chicken Salad: Back to the Beginning.” Willowtree, 2011.

http://www.chickenscratch-blog.com/chicken-salad-back-to-the-beginning. Accessed 17

May 2017.