"It shouldn't be allowed", but it has already happened, that two of my favourite foods have been eliminated and replaced with fake, garbage, vegan substitutes.
As a kid, Fry's Turkish Delight (milk chocolate coated TD) was my absolute favourite sweet; and when I later discovered actual Turkish Delight (powdered with fine sugar) I liked that very much as well.
But the stuff they sell under that name now is completely different, because "They" have eliminated the essential ingredient of gelatin, because it comes from animals.
So the pseudo-TD is just gooey sugar-gel, flavoured with rose water - which I find so vile that I can't eat it.
Pease Pudding (as in the nursery rhyme*) is a traditional, working-class, North English garnish; which is traditionally made from the stock remaining after boiling a ham, ideally flavoured with onion, celery and a carrot.
You boil dried split peas (which are a bit like larger, beige lentils) in the stock, until they have softened to a thick paste. It is the perfect accompaniment to ham; and makes an excellent sandwich. The only problem is that the process takes long time - more than an hour, and then the pease pudding should be allowed to cool - and this takes longer than roasting the boiled ham.
So I have recently bought "pease pudding" from the local supermarket; and discovered a pseudo-product that is so bland and flavourless that it actually detracts from the meal. This is simply because it is not the same thing - unsurprisingly, because this vegan product is made of split peas and... salted water.
And vegans wonder why normal people hate them so much!
*Pease pudding hot, Pease pudding cold, Pease pudding in the pot, Nine days old. Some like it hot, some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot, nine days old.
...But nobody likes it with salted water, instead of ham stock.
17 comments:
Always liked hearing about candies in UK and Scotland. My sister lived there for a few years and she always brought several candy bars we couldn't get in the States when she came to visit. If I knew you guys had chocolate covered Turkish delight I would have insisted she bring some of those.
Sorry to hear about your vegan candy. There's nothing they can't ruin!
You can't buy prepared foods anymore; you have to buy ingredients and make everything yourself, if you want something good. It's been this way for my whole life, but I'm open to the idea that it may have been different in the past
There was a bakery I liked going to for its croissants. It closed for a while because its owner died, and when it reopened, the croissants were disgusting.
My girlfriend had bought them for me and woke me up. I took a bite, and before I could swallow, she kept pushing more pieces in to my mouth, which amused her.
When I could finally tell her it was disgusting, she tasted them herself and realized. We never bought them again.
That old owner was the last bastion preventing them from replacing the butter with canola oil (or some crap). When he died, the bakery died.
I hope that old bugger is baking glorious pastries in heaven
I’m glad you shared this, because recently at a Halloween party (themed on Roald Dahl’s The Witches) my kids were given ingredients for a “brew” to take home, a brew that *would* have made pease porridge except that it was also vegetarian! And for all the claims that Dahl would not approve of changes to his works, he was rather a lame sort of leftist on animal issues, so I fear it was entirely on-point.
In any event, I regretted very much letting this be my younger daughter’s first semi-solo cooking project as predictably it came out…not very enjoyable. I offered to add bacon at least but she’s a stick-to-the-recipe kind of toddler. Perhaps it will eventually be a lesson in the downsides of that approach to cooking and life! And now I know just what to do with the remaining “brews” once we have a Christmas ham to dispense with.
P.S. the anti-gelatin thing thankfully did not catch on in America but it is a kosher thing as well as vegan. Another thing to thank Jesus for!
I suppose it never occurred to the vegans/vegetarians to simply avoid these foods. That is what I did, when I was a vegetarian. The fake substitutes like "veggie burgers" were always an unspeakable horror.
@Brett - It's the usual double standard - Vegans are allowed to enforce their preferences on the populace, while it is frowned-upon for omnivores to force-feed vegetarians with lard (https://www.lloydianaspects.co.uk/opinions/whyVegetariansShouldBeForcefedWithLard.html).
In my circles, it has long been held that vegetarianism (and now veganism - the more virulent form) is a sexually transmitted disease, of which women are the carriers. (You needn't reveal here whether this was true in your case!)
@Mia and Hagel - I'm not a foodie, quite relaxed about what I eat and where. Indeed (on bio-medical grounds) I do not think diet is very important for human beings - except in extreme ways. But I hate to see gratuitous destruction of innocent enjoyment.
Probably Britain's favourite biscuit was McVites chocolate digestives; but these were ruined by the manufacturers making them "low fat" - so they now have the texture of sawdust.
(If there is anything more ignorant/ gullible/ negative than the "low fat" vogue, I don't know of it.)
@Bruce I had the misfortune of being raised in the 90s. I have very vivid memories of my first taste of delicacies like whole milk or “regular” Wheat Thins…I vaguely even recall the beef tallow fries at McD’s.
One of the most practical benefits of learning about human genetics was being able to let go of the hope that this or that dietary change would radically alter the physical health of me or my family. Literally every mom-friend is on an insane (and stressful and expensive) aqua vitae quest, each different, none yielding any positive results. It’s sad. Besides that education, I think God helped us out with generally healthy children but each with their own extreme, largely untreatable challenge, where the “crunchy” holistic options just were not appealing, could not actually fix the current problem, offered only vague ideas about reducing future problems at the cost of enormous dietary vigilance…all to allegedly improve a body part that is essentially fully formed in the womb!
It’s all so tiresome. The number of times I’ve talked to someone about their child’s diet and asked “Did it change anything?” and the answer has been “Not really, but I’m glad we did it anyway” is depressing. Even when they can readily list off the down sides of the diet, they can’t let it go!
Oh, and I was going to relate how I once made gluten-free mincemeat pies for the office. The boss had celiac’s, but I forgot about the Hindu coworkers who unknowingly ingested suet…and in the end the boss didn’t eat it anyway (his “celiac’s” turned out to be cover for an eating disorder but that’s another story). This whole thread is reminding me why every year I resolve to be less accommodating!
Bruce with regards to Fry's Turkish delight the problems started when Mondelez the American multinational bought Cadbury's and then proceeded to close down UK production and trash the products, you see it's all about the bottom line the customers and product are secondary.
@MB - It's part of the problem. But I also had some Turkish Delight some friend had brought back from Turkey, and it was just the same - just as inedible.
I miss the Cadbury Creme eggs of my youth. Even the filling of the new ones seems off. I remember it being soft and luminous, almost clear. Now it's like a thick paste. The only homemade Cadbury eggs I've seen that come close to the originals are these ones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPDvxnqrPRI
There's a brand of calcium gummy vitamins here in the states that went through this vegan transmogrification. I used to take a calcium gummy supplement which tasted sweet, tart, fruity, chewy, and very delicious. Then sometime during the latter stage of the birdemic the company sneakily changed the gummies to horrible dry pasty flavorless pucks, so I had to search for a different calcium supplement. (There was no "New Improved!" notification on the bottle like brands used to do.)
It seems that during the birdemic years there were slow and almost imperceptible changes to food that I normally would buy. For example, I used to purchase a brand of frozen chicken nuggets that was actually quite good. When the nuggets started tasting like cardboard I had to ditch them completely. Other meals that we liked, like prepared frozen beef stew, simply vanished from the shelves. I joked to my husband that the grocery store would go out of its way to eliminate all the foods that were actually good in their store. Maybe they were trying to turn us all into vegans! "You WILL eat the bugs!"
Hi Bruce, is there anything you have written touching on your aside “Indeed (on bio-medical grounds) I do not think diet is very important for human beings - except in extreme ways” - it would be a welcome antidote to the “diet is everything” crowd that dominates the alternative health space on so much social media these days…
@David IH - I don't think I've written about it, or not for about thirty years! (When I was an epidemiologist.) A medic author called James le Fanu certainly wrote about this at some point - and I think I first heard the argument from him.
Thanks Bruce! I used to read his DT columns yonks ago; to my surprise he still writes for them. I’ll do some digging.
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