Fake burgers, fake chicken, fake fish: the vegan products tested for you

Fake meat, to-fish, fake chicken nuggets, meatballs and vegan burgers. January was Veganuary, the self-proclaimed “largest vegan movement in the world” that inspires people to try a plant-based diet for a month, hoping it will continue throughout the rest of the year. We tried it for one evening to test a nice selection of vegan animal-like products currently sold in the supermarket. Not rice, chickpeas, tofu or seitan, but fake burgers, fake chicken, fake beef meatballs, fake fish, fake sausages… presented in a-shape and with the promise of substituting for taste and texture dishes of animal origin.

Here’s how it went.

SHOPPING
I went to the supermarket (three or four to tell the truth) paid for and collected packages. The selection of products between vegan cutlets and quinoa burgers it has grown exponentially over the years, occupying linear meters of the refrigeration counters. From two or three Valsoia products in circulation since the Eighties, national chains are spoiled for choice of packages with ready-to-cook preparations. In supermarkets like Naturasì instead the raw material prevails: seitan and tofu, natural or in different flavors, a sign that the choices of a general public are different from the customers of a shop specializing in natural, organic and vegan-vegetarian foods. The former do not cook or would not know how to cook these foods of the future. Although at Esselunga, for example, they also sell vegan mince.

THE TASTING GROUP
I followed slavishly the cooking instructions without adding any seasoning and gathered around a table six people with the most disparate tastes and eating habits (but deeply Milanese). I, unrepentant omnivore and burns frying pans; Francesca, fellow journalist and expert cook; the two art directors Clara, as demanding as one grown up in Vico Equense, and Malcom, «who doesn’t eat this stuff»; Luca who is divided between Lodi and the Navigli, who experiments out of curiosity and has a past as a quasi-vegetarian, and Dale, my friend, singer and performer, ex-vegan and now a vegetarian who has tried them ALL. And he explains to me why to eat lupine frankfurters or make soy meatloaf.

WHY DO YOU DO IT? THE QUESTION
Why not limit yourself to single dishes rich in legumes? Reading the labels of these products on a nutritional level there is no reason to consume themIndeed, being ready-made and industrial dishes, they are, like all products of this type, more fat and caloric than the originals. “It’s not all super healthy or light, on the contrary, and many products are nothing more than hamburger-shaped vegetables with which one ends up eating side dish + side dish – Dale explains to me – One eats them out of curiosity, for gluttony, but above all to vary because after all we are used since childhood to eat first courses or main courses and when you are vegan the second is a mirage: what do you put in it? After months or years of first courses and unique dishes… you are looking for a substitute ».

REPLACE THE SLICE
These products exist to replace the good old slice! Vegan or not, we have in common the cultural conditioning given by our eating habits and leads us to think about meals in a certain way. You can do without them one, two, three, five days a week and mix (as the true Mediterranean diet would like) cereals, vegetables, legumes, perhaps with an egg or a piece of cheese. But in the long run and even with all the creativity of the case, in the end you would really like to eat a second. And so we end up first making vegetarian meatballs and then looking for substitutes for cutlets. The Beyond Burger or the Unconventional Burger that ended up on all the pages of newspapers was born precisely to replace in the diet of omnivores not all, but a little real meat with soy protein or peas, in a form so similar to be accessible to the general public. More than for the few vegans they were therefore born for the market of the so-called “flexitarians” who eat less meat for their own health and for that of the planet, or who at least would like to, and who thanks to burgers, vegan chicken nuggets and sticks of tofu-based fish they do it much more willingly. Or almost, because if some products have really surprised us in a positive way, others instead….

Browse the gallery to discover the products, the result of this very little objective test and the faces of those who have done it for you by lending their body to science.

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