Meat Substitutes under the Microscope

One of the things you hear again and again these days is that less meat in the diet is better - for both health (generally speaking) and the environment. 

That is all well and good; however, what I don't really get is the many fake meat products. Usually heavily processed and full of stuff to make the result more or less seem like a meat sausage or whatnot, they are also generously packaged in lots of plastic and usually at least at the price point of actual meat products... even if you buy organic.

As a rule, I don't go for these stand-in products unless there's an opportunity to try a tiny little bit of it. And until now, I have not found any of them to really come close to the stuff they are trying to copy. Even if the texture of some fine-ground sausage is actually quite close to the original, the taste just is... off. It lacks the taste of meat (which is logical, but, well, if you eat it because you like the pork taste... it's lacking). 

Apparently it's also really difficult to emulate the structure of meat by processing and mixing other things. There's a paper about this (from Physics of Fluids, interestingly), that is freely available. So if you're interested in a very close look at Veggie sausage compared to the meaty stuff... enjoy.