I have recently discovered my love for tofu. Turns out all the people who always told me that you just needed to do x to make it taste good were lying and you actually need to do Y. We’re currently using about 2 pounds of tofu per week and a lot of it is used to make fake bacon.
Start by making am marinade: soy sauce, barbecue sauce (if you really want it vegan, use some without honey), liquid smoke (the secret ingredient to so many things) and whatever you like. I often use herbs, or some fruit sirup, garlic, … Put it into a ziplock bag or plastic box. Slice some smoked tofu into thin slices and put into the marinade. It should be in there for at least a couple of hours, best over night. You can now fry it in a pan or an airfryer, or use it like that. And unless you need to be careful with sodium, you can eat hlf a pound and still call it healthy.
My supermarket has a pre-marinated (I think it’s just paprika with some sesame oil) tofu that’s really good. It’s been my go-to meat substitute ever since I turned vegetarian 25 years ago. I’ve tried marinating tofu myself, but generally I’m really just a too lazy cook for that!
You may also enjoy tempeh (your marinade will work for that too, but I tend to use a marinade of soy sauce, garlic, ginger and some ransom spices), do note you need good fresh tempeh and it can spoil fast. (Contrary to tofu which can keep for quite a while.)
Why is honey not considered vegan? It’s not like the beekeepers kill the bees or let them starve after they take some of it and we need bees to pollinate everything else vegan anyway.
I like tofu, but it is here actually more expensive than chicken or pork so economically, it makes zero sense for me to eat it, especially since my parents do not like it and it also makes no economic sense to cook just for myself in a household of three. What does make sense is to use a dried soy meat substitute and put it together with the chicken in the baking pan. It soaks some of the chicken taste, I eat the soy, my parents eat the chicken and everybody is happy.
If someone does not want/cannot go full vegan/vegetarian but does want to reduce meat consumption, this is IMO the way to do it.
@Charly
It’s a good question and I don’t have a good answer.
Now, in the strictest sense it is an animal product and yes, the beekeeper takes the bees’ food supply and substitues it with cheaper sugar water.
I asked my daughter and honestly, I think that the argument starts from the finish line (animal product = animal abuse) and then tries to reason backwards. Sometimes it’s “too many honey bees are bad for wild bees” (can be true) and sometimes it’s alleged abuse against honey bees (clipping the queens wings or treating them against varoa milb, which can wipe out a whole colony)
Tofu is actually the one meat substitute that is cheaper than meat, maybe because it’s older than beyond meat etc.
Not an expert on beekeeping or vegan philosophy, but your first and third point are exactly what I’d imagine (some) vegans have an issue with.
Modern beekeeping is quite intensive, just like any modern animal farming, and micromanages the bees’ lives quite a lot (involving for example artificial insemination of queens, however creepy and/or comical it may sound). Then again, some highly principled people might not really care about the details, but rather operate on the assumption that harvesting any animal produce is inherently harmful for the animals, or at the very least violates their dignity and such.
@2 Charly
Honey an animal product, with no bees there would be no honey. Similarly milk is an animal product, the cows don’t get killed, but they’re still “kept” so that us humans can feed themselves.
I’m not a vegan, but I do know some, and the very strict ones can get a bit weird. For example, no pets, as that’s using animals for your own pleasure.
I am not an expert on beekeeping or veganism either, the family tradition of beekeeping was killed due to my allergies when I was in the crib, but “intensive beekeeping” is necessary to pollinate many crops grown on an industrial scale. Like most Rosacea fruits (apples, cherries, almonds, etc) some vegetable oil sources (sunflowers, rapeseed), and many, many others (tomatoes, cucumbers). Wild bees are currently often not enough for sufficient pollination in large orchards or fields. Avoiding honey while eating apples is thus logically inconsistent.
I did not research it particularly thoroughly but I would think that most wild bee species are in decline not mainly due to competition from honey bees (although that probably does play a role too) but due to habitat destruction and disappearance of wildflowers due to too intensive mowing of grass (I know for a fact that too zealous grass mowing does affect negatively many small species of butterflies, like blue butterflies), overuse of pesticides, etc. None of those problems is helped by abstaining from honey. Wild bees and other insects could probably pollinate all or most of our crops, but only if they are allowed to thrive -- and that needs a much more complex approach to the environment than “animal product=bad therefore honey=bad”.
Aaaaand now that I think about it I should not be hijacking this thread with my musings about honey. So I quit talking about it.
‘“intensive beekeeping” is necessary to pollinate many crops grown on an industrial scale’
I did not know that! Now I’m really curious what’s gonna happen if I throw that little factoid at some of my more fiercely vegan friends. :D
That said, is indeed a bit of a honey coated side-threat, and I’ll stop too.
robert79
I think many of them would just say that you can keep the bees but must not extract the honey