Haha unfortunately it comes with the territory when refusing animal products but still wanting to eat similar to everyone else - I CAN have my cake and eat it too, kinda (with soy cream).
Honestly, while I love eating butter, I’d rather not look for similar looking replacements.
I can very well go with peanut/coconut oil (for cooking) and blended peanut for spreading, instead of using randomly processed industrial idk-what-oil based stuff that was originally developed with the intent to reduce costs to companies and then half-heartedly attempted to cater to those who care about nutrition, with a whole fake health campaign to make it work.
Forget that, I’d rather just eat my bread with water.
There are plenty of good substitution products available nowadays - even found one not-butter tasty enough to make my whole family switch to it, until it went out of production… probably as well for our arteries. But I’ve yet to find a good replacement cheese though, so I’d rather go without.
Out of curiosity, where do you live? I’m in Scotland with occasional visits to Hungary, and both have a bunch of kinds of vegan cheese now. In the UK it’s more mainstream, but in Hungarian “organic shops” I found some interesting ones, like strawberry-flavoured cream cheese, that we don’t have in Scotland.
Back when I became vegan in 2012, the Scottish vegan cheese situation was dreary, but by the pandemic it got pretty good.
My simple answer to substitution is to just eat something else and not look for a substitute.
Most of these substitutes are just substrates made out of whatever can pass as similar and with “added vitamins” to check boxes, a lot of which don’t even end up properly working like the vitamin in the form as it is in the original object. And this is on top of the manufacturing costs of the ultra-processed foods which seem low because of how normal food prices have been inflated.
There is a huge variety of diets that has historically worked for people and any can be chosen or even mixed and matched to complete dietary requirements.
For instance, you don’t need dairy with your bread. Just make good quality pulses and beans with gravy (can be eaten with rice) and use some of the remaining gravy to make your bread tasty or just have bread with those pulses. Quite a few of the remaining nutrients can be obtained from accompanying salads and fruits. On top of that, fruits contain many more components (often lost when processed) whose effects have not yet been properly appreciated and quantified, making it hard to give them as supplements.
For some remaining nutrients unavailable as components of vegetable food, historically, people used fasting. Although this depends upon the specific gut microbiome and whether fasting will cause the specific nutrients to be produced, so I guess this cannot be lightly recommended across geo-cultur-racial boundaries. (Now of course, if some rich people really wanted to help with this, someone could come up with some probiotic drink that permanently enabled people generate those nutrients on fasting)
But I want cake, so I’ll eat cake (with the available substitutions) because I can.
When I want beans, I eat beans because I can.
When I want cheese, I suffer 'til it passes because I can’t.
Easy-peasy!
Wouldn’t be mead without honey.
Mead-ish? Meadly?
Ha! Only 2 questions in and you are already in “you won’t believe it is butter” territory.
Haha unfortunately it comes with the territory when refusing animal products but still wanting to eat similar to everyone else - I CAN have my cake and eat it too, kinda (with soy cream).
I’ll slogan my homebrewed syrup-beer: “you won’t believe it’s mead! (it’s not)”.
Honestly, while I love eating butter, I’d rather not look for similar looking replacements.
I can very well go with peanut/coconut oil (for cooking) and blended peanut for spreading, instead of using randomly processed industrial idk-what-oil based stuff that was originally developed with the intent to reduce costs to companies and then half-heartedly attempted to cater to those who care about nutrition, with a whole fake health campaign to make it work.
Forget that, I’d rather just eat my bread with water.
There are plenty of good substitution products available nowadays - even found one not-butter tasty enough to make my whole family switch to it, until it went out of production… probably as well for our arteries. But I’ve yet to find a good replacement cheese though, so I’d rather go without.
Out of curiosity, where do you live? I’m in Scotland with occasional visits to Hungary, and both have a bunch of kinds of vegan cheese now. In the UK it’s more mainstream, but in Hungarian “organic shops” I found some interesting ones, like strawberry-flavoured cream cheese, that we don’t have in Scotland.
Back when I became vegan in 2012, the Scottish vegan cheese situation was dreary, but by the pandemic it got pretty good.
My simple answer to substitution is to just eat something else and not look for a substitute.
Most of these substitutes are just substrates made out of whatever can pass as similar and with “added vitamins” to check boxes, a lot of which don’t even end up properly working like the vitamin in the form as it is in the original object. And this is on top of the manufacturing costs of the ultra-processed foods which seem low because of how normal food prices have been inflated.
There is a huge variety of diets that has historically worked for people and any can be chosen or even mixed and matched to complete dietary requirements.
For instance, you don’t need dairy with your bread. Just make good quality pulses and beans with gravy (can be eaten with rice) and use some of the remaining gravy to make your bread tasty or just have bread with those pulses. Quite a few of the remaining nutrients can be obtained from accompanying salads and fruits. On top of that, fruits contain many more components (often lost when processed) whose effects have not yet been properly appreciated and quantified, making it hard to give them as supplements.
For some remaining nutrients unavailable as components of vegetable food, historically, people used fasting. Although this depends upon the specific gut microbiome and whether fasting will cause the specific nutrients to be produced, so I guess this cannot be lightly recommended across geo-cultur-racial boundaries. (Now of course, if some rich people really wanted to help with this, someone could come up with some probiotic drink that permanently enabled people generate those nutrients on fasting)
That may be.
But I want cake, so I’ll eat cake (with the available substitutions) because I can.
When I want beans, I eat beans because I can.
When I want cheese, I suffer 'til it passes because I can’t.
Easy-peasy!
Great. Now I feel like eating cake.