Jonah Lehrer, at The Frontal Cortex draws attention to a new study, which links personal values to taste. Lehrer explains:
…subjects were asked to rate a variety of sausages. People who scored high on “social authority” - they believed it was important to support people in power - tended to label the “vegetarian” sausage as inferior, even when the vegetarian sausage was actually from a cow. Likewise, people who scored low on “social power values” tended to score the vegan sausage much higher than the beef sausage, even when they were actually eating meat. Instead of judging the food product on its merits, they ended up preferring the product that more closely conformed to their value system.
A few years ago, an acquaintance told me a similar story. His father was a food scientist who, in the early 1980s, conducted taste tests for meat substitutes at US shopping malls. Even when served real meat, masquerading as soy, tasters dismissed the food as artificial, and not at all meatlike.
I can relate. Before becoming a vegetarian, I can remember sitting in a Chinese restaurant, disdainfully prodding my tofu and broccoli with a fork. Conversely, I can still feel the sting of disappointment when—after finding a recipe for pork sausage and dutifully recreating the mixture of spices, but for a soy sausage lasagna—my sister disdainfully prodded my creation with her fork.
To be fair, the more processed a food, the easier it is to mimic the original flavor. Does any hot dog really resemble flesh? It’s much harder—though not impossible—to imitate gristle or skin.
So, while a soy sausage might be an objectively suitable meat sausage replacement—and certainly better for the environment—both foods are so highly processed they should be eaten sparingly, if at all.
The original study, authored by Michael W. Allen, Richa Gupta and Arnaud Monnier, can be found here.