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| Other sausages are available |
I've been a vegetarian since I was 15 and was diagnosed with a severe allergy to chicken and other meat, and for years I've led a happy plant-based existence, dallying into fish and dairy so not strictly towing the line for full Veganism. I've never had a problem getting enough protein and I've certainly never had a problem with getting enough fat either - but since having my gall bladder removed and a dalliance with liver disease (which turned out to be 'fatty liver' instead) I've always kept a close eye on the fat levels in food.
Meat substitute products are weird. They have exploded in popularity over the last few years since the whole "Veganuary" movement kicked off, offering a tempting taste of 'what if' for meat-free folk, or perhaps a comforting panacea for folk who suffer all the way through Veganuary or Meat-Free Mondays grumbling while their other halves extol the virtues of bringing more plants into their diets, but leaping straight back onto the pork sausages, beef burgers and chicken nuggets once the whole thing is over.
Hugely over-processed foods (like the various "pretend" meat products, such as the sausages picture above) are born in a lab just like lab-grown meat, the Frankensteinian product of scientists who are trying to emulate the look, the taste and the texture / "Mouth Feel" of real meat products.
With the "This" range, the emphasis has been on reproducing that fatty flavour of pork sausages through something they call "Fat 2.0" - something that's made out of olive oil (apparently), cost millions of quid to develop, but has a distinct aftertaste you get from those hideous fake bacon products that various manufacturers make. There are 12.8g of fat per 100g with each sausage weighing in at around 45g of fat each.
Eating these, I guess you're consuming roughly half the fat of the average pork sausage, so you could kid yourself that you're picking the healthy option. But are you? I mean sausages are probably not the best example to pick on (because you'd be an idiot to consider a pork sausage as being just prime cuts of lean pork after all) but I wonder about all that methylcellulose and other weird content these things have in them, and whether my poor guts are in a real state the next morning, not so much because of the far but all the other stuff that these things have in them.
As a family we're always trying to strike that balance between eating healthily, but having a stock set of recipes and meals we can bash out in a hurry when everyone arrives home after a day at work or school and is too knackered to go all "Deliciously Ella" and prepare a colossally complicated meal from a metric ton of ingredients that we just don't factor into our weekly shop because they don't last. We don't have the time or the luxury of being able to afford to go and shop 'fresh' every few days, so inevitably our weekly shop involves buying a fair amount of 'hardier' fresh veg that we know we will use and not waste, plus cans and frozen veg to make up the shortfall. We can make soups, stews, pasta dishes, pizza, shepherds pie alternatives etc fairly easily but introducing variety has always been a problem, particularly as the girls are extremely fussy and my other half always insists that any evening meal has to be "Hot, cooked" to make up for eating sarnies or a cold lunch.
The roundabout point I'm trying to make (badly) is that it's far too easy to fall into bad habits with plant-based stuff, even when you're trying to do the right thing and cut down on your meat consumption to save the planet. But are you? Most plant-based food companies hang their hats on their B Grade credentials but you've got to wonder about what it takes to produce a meat-alternative sausage that alleges to mimic the real thing, and whether there's really any better future in a meat-free world.
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