Christopher A. Wheeler

So I had breakfast this morning at the Cottage. They usually have pretty good breakfast stuff. (Slightly off-topic: if you ever have a chance to try their Morning Glory Muffins, GO FOR IT! It’s amazing.)

Anyways, this morning I saw this strange looking flat stuff in one of the hot pans. I asked the girl behind the counter what it was and she said it was vegetarian bacon. She said it tasted like real bacon, and lately I’ve been looking to try some new foods, so I thought I would give it a shot. It looked to me what I imagine it would look like if somebody took some cardboard and tried to make it look like bacon. And that is how it tasted. Like cardboard. With artificial bacon flavoring added. Being a huge fan of real bacon myself, I didn’t care for this stuff at all, and needless to say, I did not finish it.

It got me to thinking though, why would anybody even want vegetarian bacon? I realize here in Iowa City, there is a substantial population who are vegetarian/vegan because of the whole cruelty to animals thing. I would guess that most of them weren’t raised vegan, but adopted this lifestyle later in life. Perhaps the carnivore-turned-vegan crowd loves bacon, and they still want that bacon taste. Plus, why would they want to eat something that was supposed to “mimic” the real thing? They don’t like it when people pretend to hurt animals on television or the movies. Maybe heart-conscious consumers want a healthier alternative to the delicious, greasy, strips of bacon.

Surely neither of these are right, since this stuff didn’t really taste like bacon. It’s a mystery to me.