I got into a friendly scrap with a vegan on Twitter who was gushing over a new eatery in London that sells a meat substitute which looks like fried chicken.
“Does it taste like tofu?” I asked, trying to be sarcastic and funny and unable to fathom why people would want to eat wheat gluten that looks like the tasty but terribly greasy chicken that you get in a “bucket”.
“It tastes like chicken, just without the cruelty,” the vegan shot back from the Twitter handle, Veganuary, adding a smiley face. The aim of these Twitterati is to reduce the suffering of animals and to inspire everyone to eat vegan this January and for the rest of the year.
Good luck to them! I should have realised over the years that you never make fun of people’s food habits. It’s like trying to mock something traditional in people’s lives.
As someone born in Hyderabad and deeply passionate about food, especially ‘biryani’ (it has to be mutton biryani, never fish or chicken biryani, steam-cooked and lightly spiced), I know how maddening it is when people do not understand your tastes and how your hometown mouth-watering dishes bring back nostalgic memories and remind you of your toothless cook who made lovely mince cutlets.
“Good for the chicken,” I shot back, as this was now getting personal. “What about people who cannot eat red meat because their doc wants them to only eat white meat for their health,” I said, wondering whether chickens curse the butchers or the burger makers.
There was no reply from the vegan and I wondered what would happen if one day all the chicken that are forcefully cooped up in tiny cages so that they cannot move and become fat and juicy and are shot full of steroid and antibiotics, are let free to roam, and that man and chicken learn to love each other and live like well, humankind and chicken.
The London eatery is called Temple of Seitan, a play of words obviously on seitan, which is wheat gluten and looks like meat. The picture showed a long line of people waiting to get their first bite of the stuff and I could also see it was, for some reason, located next to a halal butchery.
If I was going to give up eating meat and let all the sheep and cows also roam free over dale and hill, then I would not want my food to look like meat that came out of those infamous fast-food joints. But there was a reason. The lady who started the eatery loved fried chicken before she turned vegan 19 years ago.
Apparently there are tons of people who still miss the juicy, crunchy, fried chicken with the thick layer of flour coating.
If vegans and vegetarians seem a little crazy in the head for not wanting to eat animals and animal products, meat eaters are the other extreme. I remember waiting for hours in a Saudi town for the first American hamburger eatery to open.
There was a long line of posh cars and people were begging the flustered manager, who obviously did not expect such craziness, for a burger and trying to use ‘wasta’ (clout).
Suddenly the doors were whipped open and we elite journalists were whisked upstairs to the kid’s section where we were seated on tiny chairs with tons of kids and their maids and we blissfully ate junk food in the early hours of the morning.
(I am writing this from a secret location because as you know there are nut jobs on both sides of the great meat divide).
The rest as you know, is history. America is today one of the fattest nations on Earth and Saudi Arabia is trying to beat that record.
Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/mahmood_saberi.
