Mock meat: ultra-processed nasties in sheep's clothing

What exactly is in plant-based 'meat'? I try (and fail) to find out. Plus a recipe for a luscious, fragrant syrup cake made with real, proper food. And it happens to be suitable for vegans.

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I spent a few greedy days in London this week consuming the most delicious food and drinks on offer in the city. The only bitter taste - literally - was at The Plant Based Food World Expo. It blew my mind.

I schlepped east to ExCel Londonn for it, a vast space that’s regularly reconfigured like Lego to host Britain’s most niche exhibitions and conferences. It’s otherworldy, like an international airport or a casino where you forget what time it is and where you are. It’s filled with many people wearing lanyards.

I’m not sure what I expected from a Plant Food Expo but if I’d read the website first I might have been prepared for the fact there was no real food to be found there at all. The annual event brings together more than 4,000 stakeholders to capitalise on the rapidly evolving $11.3 billion market projected to triple in the next few years. The clue is in the corporate jargon. This event is all about big tech and plant protein cosplaying as meat.

You could, if you had the stomach for it, fill your boots with samples of ground up legumes, mushrooms and who knows what that’s been processed and extruded into things that look like eggs, cheese, chicken, sausages, steak, burgers, salmon, tuna and even caviar. Below is a carousel of 3D-printed steaks, fish fillets and other products designed to look like the real thing. My daughter and I tried the steak: initial promise quickly segued into revulsion at the pappy texture and nasty flavour.

3D-printed ‘bacon’

Appetising? This is how some plant-based ready meals and ‘meat’ products start life before they’re processed again into stuff that looks like food. The pink one is ‘ham’

‘Chicken’ that will end up in nuggets and burgers

This brand didn’t taste too bad … note spelling. The Expo is full of wordplay as well as cosplay, some clever some not, to imply the product is a meat-adjacent

Stand after stand - many of them technology companies - were selling versions of this stuff and every sample we tried was depressing (is this really the future of planet-friendly food?), confusing (like all ultra-processed food, your brain knows you’ve eaten it but your stomach doesn’t get the message) and in many cases, tasted ghastly.

Of course, if this is what you want to eat, that’s your call. What worries me is that consumers who, for very solid and understandable reasons want to avoid animal products, probably aren’t getting all the information they need to make properly informed choices.

For example, many stallholders were baffled that I was even interested to know what was in their products, and not very forthcoming when I asked; several simply replied, “the usual”. I took this to mean the typical highly-processed amalgam of plant proteins, fats and carbs that make up the bulk of these types of products. The difference between one pseudo sausage and the next is in the processing (and therefore the texture and appearance), not the ingredients. Most are also laden with preseservatives, emulsifiers, colourings and flavourings, although I didn’t notice anyone at the Expo who was overly concerned about these additives.

The stand that rankled most was where we sampled a slice of ‘tuna’. I’d clearly lost my mind by this point in the day, as I don’t know why I voluntarily ate something that resembled a wodge of puce-coloured gauze. It tasted so ghastly I had to spit it out, as did my daughter.

Vegan tuna

It turns out this stand was not selling fake tuna but tuna flavouring for manufacturers to add to their own fish-like products. In fact, the guy running the stand actually described his business as “a chemical company”. I didn’t understand his explanation of how tuna flavouring is made or what goes into it. But I did learn that the term ‘natural flavourings’ doesn’t mean what most people think it does.