Last night, I tried making a "Vegan" recipe. Ugh.
It was couscous pizza casserole. Ugh.
The couscous was ok. The sauce that went on it was good. But sweet fancy Moses did I ever make a huge mistake.
There is a reason I have always shied away from the term "Vegan." Besides the frustrating amount of condescension and superiority that seem to go along with people who call themselves "Vegan," anytime the word "Vegan" is attached to a food, that usually means one thing: it is terrible.
So why did I buy "Vegan" sausages (please understand at this point the use of quotation marks totally signifies me rolling me eyes when I say the word "Vegan") and expect anyone ever to enjoy them? They are shaped like sausages, I guess. They kind of smelled sausage-like. But the taste and texture were decidedly NOT sausage.
Marketers and manufacturers of "Vegan" food need to understand something about semiotics. When you give a name to something, you need to understand what that means. If you call a thing a sausage, when the word is invoked, the brain becomes primed with its expectations of what a sausage is. Your senses are ready to experience the thing that the brain expects to be associated with the word sausage. So when you bite into the thing that is called sausage with all of your little neurons at rapt attention, it had better %*#@ing taste like a sausage.
My theory is that if you didn't call it a sausage, we would all better accept it. Call it a Nutritional Flavor Tube or something similar. Call it a Smoky Tofu Cylinder. If you called it any of these things, I think we all could have found a way to enjoy it. But when you call it a sausage and it is so far removed from sausage that you couldn't hit sausage with a shotgun, you have basically committed a crime.
This is why I have never liked "Vegan" food.
That being said, Vegan Mozzarella was pretty good.
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