New Vegan Chicken Tastes Like the Real Thing—Should We Be Afraid?

Slashfood is calling it the "biggest advancement in vegan cuisine since the much-mocked Tofurky," while Time Magazine titled its story "Tastes Like Chicken." All this news is about a 10-year research project by scientists at the University of Missouri who crafted what they believe to be a veggie meat that actually tastes like its animal doppelganger.

Apparently this decade of research has been geared toward improving the taste of faux-chicken and the way it actually feels in the mouth. As Time reports: "Not too soft, not too hard, but with that ineffable chew of real flesh. When you pull apart the Missouri invention, it disjoins the way chicken does, with a few random strands of 'meat' hanging loosely."

I have such mixed emotions about this latest scientific breakthrough it's hard to know where to begin. Firstly, as a vegetarian who has not eaten meat in 20 years, I think that much of this hard work will be lost on me and folks like me. I don't even remember what meat tastes (or feels) like—at least I think I don't. After I made a batch of super delicious vegetarian meatballs (which did not contain any veggie meat), my partner (also a vegetarian) was so delighted with them she asked our friend (a meat eater) if they were not the best meatballs ever and if she could even tell they weren't made of meat. While my friend agreed they were tasty, she did not even remotely think they could pass as actual meat.

And that brings me to another issue. Do we want our veggie meat to taste so much like real meat that we can't tell the difference? That probably depends on your reason for not eating meat. If you absolutely love the taste of real meat but are put-off by the environmental and ethical implications of meat production, then our Missouri scientists are likely doing you a great service.

It's also important to note that just because a food product is vegetarian or vegan doesn't make it healthy or environmentally sustainable. Genetically modified soy that's grown with copious amounts of water and pesticides is not a real winner in my book. And it's especially onerous if rainforests are being clearcut to make room for those soy fields. I'm not in favor of that kind of soy being used to feed livestock, either.

If this "chicken" means that a bunch of meat eaters may be willing to throw this faux-chicken on the grill some day instead of a real one that would have lived a miserable life packed into a chicken house and pumped full of antibiotics, then that could be a good thing. But eating food engineered in a lab seems as unnatural to me as the way we treat poultry and livestock in our industrial meat system. Processed soy is still a processed food, with not much in the way of nutrition. And there are many that think eating unfermented soy in large quantities may not be great for your health.

With all those caveats aside, when I think back to the options for vegetarians 20 years ago when I first stopped eating meat, I'm pretty grateful that there are some edible veggie meat concoctions on the market. While I wouldn't want to gulp them down in large quantities and prefer to try to eat food that comes from farmers instead of scientists, I do love a good veggie burger during a summer BBQ. Perhaps I'll even try the "chicken" some time.

Photo credit: laverrue