TOM EATON | Not a sausage am I going to be duped into eating plant-based meat

The ANC government might not be trying to keep us employed, educated, solvent or indeed alive, but at least, by trying to crack down on plant-based meat substitutes, it has shown a refreshing willingness to try to keep South Africans safe from things that might be good for us.

I understand if you haven’t heard about this. The products the state wants removed from supermarket shelves are eaten by a relatively tiny number of people. Real meat still holds a very special place in the hearts of millions of South Africans, mostly around the aortic valve and inside some key arteries.

As the spouse of a vegetarian, however, and as someone who will eat literally anything that is left unguarded on a saucer in the fridge, and has therefore devoured more than his fair share of ersatz sausages, I find the attempt to ban non-harmful food somewhat startling, not least because the reason provided was so transparently disingenuous.

According to the department of agriculture, land reform and rural development, the offending items need to be removed because their packaging uses words associated with real meat, such as “burger”, “sausage” and “nugget”, and that the use of these words is potentially misleading to shoppers.

By this logic, no Kentucky-based fryer of chickens should ever be allowed to sell something called a “nugget” in case it convinces a grizzled prospector that he’s just bought the cheapest and most crumb-covered gold ever mined.

But of course the mining industry doesn’t feel threatened by chicken farmers and therefore doesn’t feel the need to issue instructions to the department of agriculture the way, it’s been rumoured, the meat lobby did.

Affected producers have tried pointing out all the cases in the rest of the world in which those meaty words are legally applied to plant-based products, but our parochial protectionists are adamant: they need to find new ways to describe their products.

This will be difficult. “Sausage” is a grand little euphemism, cheerfully refusing to describe graunched up flesh of unclear provenance stuffed into a condom made of the sub-mucosa of intestines. Denied that veil of linguistic coyness, plant-based alternative will probably have to be called something like “protein rods”, which sounds less like a food than a suppository for bodybuilders.

By this logic, no Kentucky-based fryer of chickens should ever be allowed to sell something called a ‘nugget’ in case it convinces a grizzled prospector that he’s just bought the cheapest and most crumb-covered gold ever mined.

Then again, perhaps I’m underestimating the creativity of people who can turn peas into greasy, savoury, toothsome lengths of ... something. The Beyond range has already got it right, making pea protein sound like an episode of Star Trek: “What lies Beyond Meatballs, Mr Spock? Just more Meatballs, or ... something ...  more?”  

I understand that consumers need to be protected. But in this case, it all feels a little unhinged, as meat-eaters, who have no ethical qualms about eating vegetable products, get protected from accidentally eating them at the expense of consumers whose beliefs prevent them from eating meat.

I’m also not convinced we meat-eaters care that much about what we put in our mouths.

This is of course the result of childhoods spent eating unrefrigerated polony and the last garage pie on the shelf, slowly building up a kind of psycho-intestinal invulnerability.

I felt it myself some years ago, when I found myself in Transylvania, asking a cadaverous Romanian waiter to tell me what was in a certain meatball I was eying on the menu.

“The pigs in Eastern Europe,” he said confidently, “are essentially a kind of seasoning, present in almost all meals, including vegetarian ones.

“The cows,” he continued, counting them on his fingers, “the chickens. And the sheeps. And ...”

He tailed off. The word wasn’t coming to him, or perhaps it was and he didn’t want to say it. With a slightly furtive glance away into the night, where mist was starting to slide between the foothills of the Carpathians, he softly said: “The other one ...”

In retrospect, I suppose “the other one” was horse or donkey. At that moment, however, with the night closing in, and the first bats starting to flutter past on the edge of the encroaching darkness, it might have been anything: a cat; a dog; a pro-democracy activist ...

Of course I ordered it at once, safe in the knowledge that the pigs and the cows and the chickens and the sheeps would soak up The Other One. Compared with those 1980s garage pies, this was basically salad.

I am trying to eat less meat these days, but I still understand the delicious denial of the carnivore-cum-garbage-disposal. Some resist it: there will always be those bores who lecture everyone on how rare they should eat their steak, as if it’s not just prettied-up carrion. But the rest of us know exactly what we are and what we’re doing, and have the cognitive dissonance headaches to prove it. We know what sausages and burgers look like and where our favourites are. And none of us is going to pick up a packet with a picture of a leaf on it, look at the light beige matter inside and think, “Oo, let me try this one instead of my usual gore-fest.”

So for heaven’s sake, let the vegans and vegetarians have their pea protein. It might cost them fifty bucks a sausage, but it costs us nothing. And it might just buy all of us a bit more time on this blood-soaked little planet.