Jul 23 2007
I Loathe Soy Cheese Products
I like cookbooks. I inherited this from my mother, I’m sure, as she has an entire bookcase devoted almost entirely to her cookbooks. I am drawn to vegan cookbooks – because I like to eat mostly vegan, because they give me lots of ideas about different things to try and also because they’re pretty cute.
Webmaster of Doom Michael (WoDM) bought me How it All Vegan recently, and with his free trial of Amazon Prime, it showed up in about two days. There’s a lot of nifty recipes in there – the baking recipes are interesting and seem a bit more reasonable (in terms of ingredients) than the baking recipes in Vegan with a Vengeance.
Last night, in the course of planning meals for the week as an attempt to stave off eating out and wasting money, I was flipping through How it All Vegan, looking for an easy, tasty and healthy dinner recipe. Almost every entree recipe contained soy cheese products. I will say this about Vegan with a Vengeance: the meals throughout that book don’t depend on soy cheese products. Although Isa, the author, wrote a recent entry in her livejournal saying that if people really wanted to make a difference in the Vegan community, they’d work on making a soy cheese that tasted good.
I hate soy cheese. I hate the concept of soy cheese. It’s expensive. It’s not like cheese at all. and I don’t understand the point of making Vegan food and substituting cheese. No one needs to eat cheese. No one. Replacing eggs in baking recipes is necessary because eggs perform a valuable service in those recipes, in terms of binding ingredients and giving a good texture to the finished product. If a recipe needs assloads of cheese – it’s not vegan and probably shouldn’t be made vegan. Go eat some chana masala and basmati rice and stop trying to make lasagna with soy cheese (although tofu can make a perfectly serviceable, albeit bland, ricotta substitute).
Being vegan shouldn’t be expensive. It should be cheap. You should be spending money on tons of cheap dry goods, spices, produce, frozen veggies, oil and the occasional special ingredients like dairy-free spread, flax seed oil, etc that you’ll need for baking. Soy cheese defeats the purpose of eating vegan as an economical alternative to eating meat or being vegetarian. It costs way more than the non-vegan product and doesn’t taste as good.
Not only that – but you have to venture into stupid yuppie stores (ie Whole Foods) to even find soy cheese. I don’t know about you, but I hate spending my lunch hour in a crowd of old people and stay-at-home moms with tons of disposable income (or else they couldn’t shop at Whole Foods) picking out produce that costs about 10 times what it should and loading up on organic soy milk and organic ground turkey. But I’ll save the organic discussion for another day – any one with half a brain can read about how little that means for most things, if they cared to. I just can’t stand being among that crowd of people, even if I’m only picking up a few things I can’t get anywhere else.
In conclusion – my meal plan for this week includes no cheese-based meals and you can be damned sure there are no soy-cheese based meals on the list either. But all the meals for the week are vegan. So eat me, you goofy-soy-cheese-sucking-down-buffoons. You’re just a slave to the man.
K.
The contents of this blog entry may not reflect the views of the webmaster of doom, Michael.