Talking Tofurky

A confession about Thanksgiving:

I’ve never been that mad about the turkey.

Photo by Lee R. DeHaan

Ditto for the gravy. But the dressing, the mashed potatoes, the cranberry sauce, the sweet potatoes with burnt marshmallows on top, the green bean casserole…sign me up. I will eat that stuff until I am green in the face and as bloated as this here squirrel:

"Fat Boy" photo by James Marvin Phelps

Upon learning that November was my month to give meat theheave-ho, at least half a dozen concerned friends and family asked if perhaps I’d forgotten the turkey holiday while planning Operation Consumption Liberation’s annual agenda. I didn’t—although, upon looking at the scrap of paper on which I originally outlined my rough ideas about OCL, it appears that I briefly entertained making May my meat-free month. No, I chose November for meat-free month precisely because of Thanksgiving, the most meat-focused American holiday of them all.

“Are you crazy?” my turkey-loving friends have asked, to which I have replied with some variation of my “I’m not that into the turkey” speech above. Others, including my dear mother, have inquired if I would be eating Tofurky this year, to which I have replied with some variation of the following rant:

If I want to eat something that looks like meat, then that “something” had better BE meat. Fake meat, like its half cousin Soy Cheese, is a food abomination. It isn’t like Tofurky and other meat imitation products are totally inedible—I have been known to stomach a Boca burger and a tofu-dog before. Still, faux meats don’t taste like meat, they don’t smell like meat, and honestly, they don’t look that much like meat either.

Not to mention the price!  You always hear about how expensive that Thanksgiving Day turkey is, so I did a little research today. According to this article, turkey prices have sky rocketed this year with a 16-pound turkey (the average size of a Thanksgiving bird) running $21.57 at the store (that’s $1.35 per pound). I suspect that’s just for your run-of-the-mill corn-fed, not organic, cage-raised turkey. But a 40-ounce Tofurky roast with gravy goes for $9.99 at Trader Joe’s. Umm, that’s a whopping $3.996 per pound. Sure, there no bones or gristle or innards or genetically-modified anything in a Tofurky, and the Tofurky comes stuffed with gravy, but still…. It’s like paying Beyoncé to play at your child’s Sweet 16 birthday party and getting this instead:

Okay, that might be worth the money. But it isn’t the real thing. Like Shaq’s Beyoncé, Tofurky is an artifice. A meat like artifice, born out of hours upon hours of test kitchen experimentation to transform the following into something meat lovers might deign to eat: Water, vital wheat gluten, organic tofu (water, organic soybeans, magnesium chloride, calcium chloride), non-genetically engineered expeller-pressed canola oil, natural vegetarian flavors, shoyu soy sauce (water, non-genetically engineered soybeans, wheat, salt, culture), non-genetically engineered corn starch, white bean flour, garbanzo bean flour, lemon juice from concentrate, calcium lactate from beets. (Taken from the Oven Roasted Tofurky Nutritional Information panel provided at Tofurky.com)  This doesn’t sound that much like food to me.

So, no, Mom and crew, I will not be eating Tofurky or any faux-meat creation on Thanksgiving. I will be eating real food, stuffing my face with every meat-free side dish on the table. And if the mashed potatoes are made with chicken broth, the green bean casserole topped with bacon, and the stuffing stuffed with oysters or sausage, I’ll just eat pie. Lots and lots of pie.

Soup Update: this week, I made this fantastic kale and lentil soup (recipe from Gretchen). I also made bread to eat with it. Fast? Check. Easy? Check. Filling? Check. Full of leafy greens?  Check!  It’s a winner!

Look at the steam rising!  And I used my camera phone!