Food is Just a Condiment Vehicle
One of the many journalism ideas that has been floating around in my divergent brain is to write food product reviews for a publication called Condiment Vehicle. The premise is that food is just something that is there so you can put tasty sauces on it. The best part of a hot dog is not the ground up hooves and thyroid glands of various random quadrupeds - it’s the ketchup and the kraut! And if you are in Chicago some other stuff like celery salt and lime green pickled peppers. The best part of a hamburger* is not the ground up body parts of bovines - it’s the mustard! Or, in my case, A.1. steak sauce.
*Friend of the blog Elaine — a vegetarian since 1969 — is happy to know that I limit myself to about six beef hamburgers a year.
The top level dot com domain name for Condiment Vehicle is available last time I checked. But nobody cares about that concept, including me. In fact - this is the last junk food review for this blog. As I mentioned in a recent post the Nirvana Wok blog will become a monthly newsletter starting next year. Doing a print edition too - just like newsletters from the old days. I will focusing like a laser on Nirvana Wok’s mutual aid projects and no longer caring about all the junk products that I encounter.
And now something nobody asked for or cares about: my final review of a corporate processed food product.
Trader Joe’s Beef-Less Ground Beef is Not Beef
Can the Trader Joe’s marketing geniuses not mention beef here? The sorry trend where vegetarian meat substitutes are supposed to resemble what they are replacing by shape and color and name is just fraudulent.
There’s a vegan ice cream place in Seattle that I love, but they don’t sell ice cream and if their marketing people had even one brain cell working (most marketing people don’t) they could have conjured up a better and more honest descriptor. Shaved ice? Freezee Treats? They sell an icy condiment vehicle that does not contain cream.
Would not use this “beef” for anything but tacos. That being said, after adding spices and onions it makes a damn fine ground beef substitute for white people taco night.
Glad this is the last time I have to write about one of Trader Joe’s fanciful fraudulent plastic-wrapped processed food products. Trader Joe’s Beef-less Ground Beef is made from textured soy protein. You gotta be careful with that stuff if you want to maintain regular bowel movements.
Also. Joe. Trader Jose. Herr Joseph. Do we really need zinc oxide in this? Caramel color? Canola oil? Guar gum?
I’m staring at the ingredients list on the fake beef here and thinking something that I am always thinking - FUCK YOU TRADER JOE’S!
—Alex
Vegetarian since 1969 I will eat meatless meat but only Morningstar fake bacon that I call Facon. I don't eat it because it is suppose to assuage meat cravings--I don't have any, but to have a salty crunchy flavoid. I don't celebrate Thanksgluttony day because of the turkey genocide that all real Americans are so caught up in. I do like and use condiments often and like to experiment with making them from scratch. I love cooked food that I make and hardly go out for food unless it is Thai, Vietnamese or French Fries with Ketchup!
As a regular Trader Joe's shopper (and, full disclosure the blogger's life partner) I don't have the same bad feelings for TJs although I completely understand the sentiment and distaste for a store that in fact has some marketing folks with brain cells --- keep it simple, white-label (almost) every product, appeal to our societal reliance on convenience, and most brilliantly, use TikTok creators (paid and unpaid) to feature products and quick recipes based on them. Love them or hate them, Trader Joe's is a solid and successful brand. I am just more willing than my daily, fresh-food-shopping foodie partner to debase myself at the altar of convenience, over packaged vegetables, and bad ingredients that provide some flavor. Alas, I will remind the blogger of the complicated food politics and culture of our (soon to be highly unregulated) country's food and grocery environments that we swim in as a family with two online teens and two tired parents with little-to-no bandwidth for robust, regular food planning. Perfect isn't on the menu. But you've eaten that fake beef a few times without knowing it was fake and you liked it. Love, the other person who grocery shops in your household.