cheese – Observations and Misunderstandings

Drum roll please…now is the time to reveal what it was that got me all worked up the other day. Edge of your seat stuff I’m sure, it would be a surprise had you not already read the title. Yes myself and a couple of friends are selling takeaway pizzas. Let’s be honest there’s nothing like a good crisis to make a little cash. They own a bakery and as they’re still open delivering bread we thought we may as well make a few pizzas as a side project and see how it goes. It’s great though because they already understand bread so we have a really nice thin sourdough base and they have proper stone ovens so they’re stonebaked too. Genuinely they’re really nice. I’m the creative director / pizzas artist. There are no takeaways open at all in the area and people seem reasonably enthused by the prospect of being able to alleviate the tedium of this current social experiment with the idea of comfort food. On top of that we will use some of the money we manage to raise and either donate it to the NHS or if there are any local families who have been affected by the virus it would be a good thing to try and help them if possible, even just a weeks food shop. Like everything it’s a lets see how it evolves thing as clearly all is currently unknown.

But yes there was the stress. I was in a terrible fettle on Wednesday. The realisation of what we were doing all came to me at once and the intensity of the energy was just too much. I can’t remember exactly what I said in the piece on Wednesday but I think towards the end I said something about channeling the energy and even if I didn’t I have had the most remarkable two days since. Whenever I found the energy building up I detached myself from it for long enough to stop it being overwhelming, but more importantly I consciously managed to use it to focus on whatever task I needed to do. This means I have been running around like a mad man for two days but have done it in a focused controlled way which was an interesting experience for such an idle man ordinarily.

Today was ridiculous, first we found out the pizza boxes weren’t going to arrive which would make selling pizzas pretty difficult. The show must go on though so we can up with some solutions but in the end managed to buy some off a man in a van in a layby and then it turned out the vegetable order hadn’t gone through so we weren’t going to have any veggies or cheese for the pizzas. We managed to behave like toilet roll fanatics in the local co-op and emptied shelves. Ultimately both these situations would have destroyed me on Wednesday but today I managed to use the power they created for focus and drive. What a feeling. Maybe this is what people do.

Anyway I’m exhausted and I’ve got to be up in the early hours again to deliver bread tomorrow. It is simply non-stop at the moment. So as the show must go on, it may be wise to draw the curtain on this piece for today. Need to conserve my energy for another evening of pizza making after all.

I have just read an article about ‘alternative meat’ products and my plan when I read the title was to have a little rant about them because I take issue with vegan sausages and vegan burgers, or anything that originally was a meat dish but has had the meat substituted for something else. It may be important to stress I have in the past spent eighteen months as a vegetarian and four as a vegan, both of which ended because of foreign delicacies, so this isn’t a rampant meat loving piece. I must also stress though that despite that and certain moral understandings, there is some hypocrisy within me as I do enjoy and eat meat despite a desire to eat less over all. My issues are two pronged, firstly the vegans and vegetarian diets when done properly should be healthier than one involving meat. That does feel like a slightly general and ambiguous statement but I don’t have space to go into detail, it’s a take my word for it moment. Things such as vegan sausages are not the healthy option, they are often high in salt and artificial flavourings, and arguably akin to the filler used to bulk out a cheap meat sausage. It is just junk food but at least junk food admits it’s junk food. Secondly vegan food, especially as there is no cheese or eggs involved, can be so creative and there are so many tasty dishes out there. We eat vegan sausage, burger, lasagne, cheese and when it is shit, partly because it just is and partly because our minds compare it to the real thing, we wonder why people who don’t know vegan food complain about not being able to eat anything, or about how shit vegan food is, or about not being able to get protein from anything. Why copy the meat versions because they will never be the meat versions and struggle to be anything in their own right, when there are so many incredible and easy dishes out there. If people just knew this more may actually become vegan or at least cut down on the consumption of animal products. Persisting with vegan sausages just misses the point.

However, I did say my plan was to rant as if I then wasn’t going to, and judging by the size of that paragraph I failed, but the article made me think I was being slightly absolutist in my beliefs. This food company Impossible Foods did appear to actually create dishes, albeit burgers, meat balls et al, which were tasty. The woman writing it did suggest the strong sauce made it unclear the exact taste of the plant based version but it did seem to be a step. Which makes me think that if someone can do it well, and actually make really decent, healthy, cheap, meat-free alternatives to dishes meat eaters love they may actually cut down the consumption of meat produced and animals killed which can only be a good thing. Of course I’m sure there are some environmental arguments for the dangers of creating huge mono crops of whatever the meat alternative is made from were these things to really become popular, but it can’t surely be anything near the production of soy or consumption of fresh water used to raise cattle, pigs or other such creatures. It is the right direction then, or a small part of the collective right direction perhaps would be better.

Tag: cheese

Meat-Free Alternative Meat