Joe Bennett: Suckered in by plant-based chicken burgers

Joe Bennett's conundrum began with a hasty trip to the supermarket. Photo / 123rf

OPINION

Look, I acknowledge it was my fault. We all make mistakes and I shan't do it again.

This article is just a way of getting it off the chest, and also - though I have only just realised this - a bid for absolution.

I would like you to forgive me. Whether you do is up to you, of course. All I ask is that you hear me out, then let your heart be the judge.

It began at the supermarket. I was in that common quandary of what to have for dinner.

With our Western plenty, we are beset by the need to make choices and choosing is hard.

For whenever we choose one thing, we must discount all other things, which then become the roads not taken. And we are greedy creatures who want to take all roads.

The nub of a meal is the meat, or the flesh as we used to call it and the Germans still do.

So I stood pensive before the shelves of meat as if at a crossroads, stymied by the need to choose a route.

We all have our signature dishes, our go-to meals, our culinary habits. Me, I bake a mean pork chop, a meaner Mongolian beef, and a Vietnamese caramelised thing so mean it makes grown men whimper.

But these dishes all take time and on the day in question, I was short of time. I wanted something to fry in haste.

I thought of bacon. I often think of bacon. I thought of steak, though I am not good at steak.

And then my eye was caught by a novelty on the top shelf, a packaged pair of chicken burgers encased in a golden crumb.

Now, I have never knowingly bought or eaten a chicken burger. And though I am fond of a crumb, I like to make my own, with an egg and parmesan and lovely Japanese panko.

Nevertheless, dear reader, I bought these chicken burgers. My reason was that notorious killer of cats, curiosity, for the burgers consisted of - have you guessed it yet? - "plant-based meat".

Yes, yes, I hear you. The very phrase is meaningless. All meat is plant based. For what does a cow or a sheep spend all day eating? Precisely.

As the Bible unimprovably put it a few thousand years ago: all flesh is grass. And will of course return to grass once more as the whirligig of time recycles its ingredients.

To buy this fake chicken was merely to cut out the middle man, so to speak, the bird that would have eaten the plant and transmuted it into bird flesh, which I, in turn, would transmute into Bennett flesh, where it would stay until such time as I went off to the eternal landfill.

But even as I prodded the eftpos machine and headed away with my burgers, I felt a twinge of unease.

For if life has taught me one thing, it is that ersatz is always ersatz, that that which pretends to be what it isn't, unfailing isn't what it pretends to be.

I think for example, of alcohol-free wine, or of margarine that is supposed to be like butter, or even of NSM.

Some 50 years ago when I was just embarking on my long and impressive smoking career, there was considerable fanfare about a tobacco substitute labelled NSM, New Smoking Material.

Here was a substance supposedly indistinguishable from tobacco but without its harmful side effects. On the much-heralded day when the stuff first came onto the market, almost all cigarette-makers offered an NSM version of their most popular brands, and most of us tried it.

NSM was dead within a week. The insuperable problem with it was that it just wasn't tobacco. Ersatz is ersatz and ever more shall be so.

A splash of oil and into the pan I slid the hockey pucks of fake chook. They sizzled as fried stuff should.

As they sizzled I made a Greekish salad to go with them, toning down the dressing the better to relish the meatless meat.

Ha. The burgers had the texture of sofa stuffing - my teeth bounced a little on contact - but lacked its gamy flavour. Indeed they lacked flavour of any description.

They were just substance, the essence of bland, condensed nullity. I gave up on the second one, fed it to the bin.

And felt ashamed. For being sucked in. For thinking man could make a chook. For the hubris of the thought.

If you can find it in you to forgive me, thank you. If not, I understand.