DIY – meat substitutes

DIY is partly about if you can’t find it on the grocery shelf in something close to its natural state, you don’t use it, and you find some other way to deal with the situation. Sustainability is another issue: the great thing about making your own yogurt is you can chain batches instead of buying another box of culture tablets. The first thing you need to know about meat substitutes is the chemical content, because the amount of non-grocery chemicals you need affects whether they can be produced sustainably.

So. There are plenty of recipes out there for black bean hamburger substitute and white bean poultry substitute, and I recommend them. We can all use more beans in our diet for the fiber. They are even pretty good on iron.

There are also recipes for tempeh, seitan and tofu. These can be more trouble. You can find  black beans and white beans in the store, but what about the ingredients for tempeh and so forth.

So I started with the best known meat substitute, tofu. And Google turned up a recipe from a company where I bought yogurt culture. And what do I see? You have to start with soy milk.

OK sure, you can find this on your grocery shelf, but is it sustainable? No. The rage for soy milk is destroying forests.

https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/soya/

So before you try to make your own tofu, you need a substantial source of soybeans, and that means having an impact on the environment.

Tempeh is also made from soybeans.

Dairy cows are fed soybeans, but soybeans are not necessary, to feed dairy cows. The German tribes who beat up on Quinctilius Varus over 2000 years ago did not have soy beans. Their cattle also did not have broad pastures sown with clover and whatnot. Or silage. They grazed on mast, the natural product of the vast German forests. If you have a multi-function farm today that includes fruit trees, you can give the dropsies to your cows. You can’t use them yourselves; the risk from E. coli is too great, as a juice factory once found out. You can also grow sugar beets and when you have processed them for sugar, you can feed the refuse to any animal on the place, including poultry. In the 1800s, England started using mangel wurzel, AKA fodder beet, to feed cattle. The Jewish Mishnah speaks of raising “pumpkins”, some kind of gourd, as cattle feed. And dairy cows put out fertilizer that hardly needs to be composted. You can’t get that from soybeans.

Seitan is different; it’s made from wheat gluten. Which means, if you’re gluten-intolerant or otherwise cutting gluten from your diet, you don’t want to eat seitan. What’s more, the gluten is only part of the protein content in wheat. Wheat is 7-22% protein by dry weight, and the gluten is 70-75% of that. So only 5-17% of your wheat grains wind up in your seitan. A pound of wheat can make a one pound loaf of bread, but you get less than 3 ounces of seitan from that same pound of wheat. And first you would have to do all the work of separating the gluten from the rest of the wheat.

Now, some of you are saying that meat substitutes can be healthier than meat, but here’s something else you probably don’t know.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/7-nutrients-you-cant-get-from-plants

If you’re not getting them in the plants, how do you get them? That’s right, supplements. Chemical products. Or by-products of the meat or dairy industries. Highly processed. Probably processed using petroleum, if they aren’t made out of petroleum, like the paraffin in Cool Whip. And you wouldn’t have to buy the supplements if you ate only 2 ounces of meat every few days. Alternated with eggs and fish, sustainably grown or caught. IOW your quarter-pounder is twice the amount of meat you need to get these nutrients, and your Big Mac is an even bigger problem.

So tell me again: why would you refuse to dial back on meat but insist on using unsustainable chemically enhanced substitutes that wouldn’t exist without factories running on petroleum?

Oh and ICYMI, almond milk has its own pros and cons.