The Vegetable Plot by Tony Bishop-Weston

Consultant Vegan Chef & Author Tony Bishop-Weston and family plotting for a more vegetable filled world.

This month,

“Are you eating too much ‘ultra-processed vegan pap’?”

The Frost Report

So my friends. The broad beans have recovered from the vicious late frost quite abundantly, the broccoli was star of tonight’s dinner and we’ve had more kale pakora last week than McDonalds sell in a year.

Moody Moobs

‘Be thankful!’ I hear you cry ‘for your abundant harvest!’ I am, it’s just those pesky, paid, professional anti-vegan self-professed food critics are really beginning to get on my moobies. Their ubiquitous mantra ‘ultra processed vegan food’ tries to cast a vegan diet as a chemical laden cornucopia of binders, fillers, enzymes, starches and flavour enhancers rather than a wicker basket laden with fruit and vegetables freshly liberated from the garden.

Dino Sore Point

Don’t get me wrong, I’m up for trying the latest vegan KitKat, Dairy Free Ice Cream, super melting no moo un-cheese, un-honey, pepperoni style vegan pastrami jackfruit and kale free burger as the next wide eyed ‘kid in a vegan sweetie shop’ old skool vegan. We even tried the new Quorn Roarsomes dinosaur bites (purely for professional research reasons) and found them to be any thing but dinosaur like. They look a bit an armadillo or a pangolin-like which I thought was a tad insensitive considering pangolins got the blame for starting the global Covid19 pandemic. Secondly, I imagined dinosaurs to taste a bit more swampy. Perhaps a little omega 3 DHA rich algae would improve things? Anyway I’d imagined this vegan turkey Twizzler-esque Captain Birdseye inspired vegan extinction rebellion French fry accompaniment would be just the red flag the spluttering anti vegan Gammons had been waiting for. But no.

Egg faced Porky Pie Wrath

Gammon ire was unleashed in an “There! I told you so!” moment on the Tesco launch of the Vegan Scotch Egg with “more than 50 ingredients” which was, as you’d expect, not Scottish and contained absolutely no egg. Sarah Augustine from Squeaky Bean said the market is lacking vegan egg alternatives.

Hypocritical Oeufs

Anyway, this got me thinking (prone to procrastination as I am) what actually is in a traditional scotch egg? i.e. the sausage on the outside and the egg on the inside and how many ingredients are we actually looking at. Banger!

I started with that Scottish Square sausage that probably most closely resembles the sausage usually found on the outside of a scotch egg.

Pork 52%, Beef fat 9%, Wheat Flour (Wheat, calcium carbonate, Iron, Niacin< Thiamine) Water, Dehydrated pork, , salt, phosphate stabiliser, spice extract, Soya, Beef flavour, Nutmeg, Coriander, ginger, Pimento, Cayene, Sodium metabisulphite E223, flavour enhancer , E621, Dextrose , Antioxidant E301, Nicotinamide, Colour: Carmines (Crushed beetles)

Connective Tissue Issue

Please bear in mind ‘Pork’ is not like saying ‘Soya bean’ in a ingredient context. If it says made with pork sausage it must be at least 42% pork but only 32% meat if it doesn’t say ‘pork’. Of that minimum of 32%, 30% is allowed to be fat and 25% connective tissue. Thus over half of the less than half, about 14%, is likely to be actual meat. In uncooked products i.e. sausages it is forbidden to include feet, intestine (apart from the skins) lungs, oesophagus, rectum, spinal cord, spleen, stomach, udder. As a traditional Scotch egg is intended as a picnic food it is precooked, so not uncooked, so feel free to use your imagination.

It’s no Yolk

Yes, ‘vegan eggs’ have stretched the imagination and eggs-pertise (sorry) of the food scientists and it takes more than just the peas of chicks and black salt to get there. But it’s also important to consider the true ingredients of eggs apart from the vegetarian delusions about what happens to all the male chicks and what ‘free range’ means in reality.

Here’s a list of ingredients of typical Layers pellets (food staple of egg laying hens)

Pigmenters (Citrazanaxathin, lutein, zeaxanthin), Wheat, Wheatfeed (includes wheatgerm), High Protein Soya Bean Meal (probably no longer GM free), Calcium carbonate (ground chalk), Maize germ meal, Sunflower seed extract, Vegetable Oil, Dicalcium Phosphate, Salt, Sodium Bicarbonate, Methionine (from vegetables), vitamin A, vitamin D3 (From lanolin from sheep wool), vitamin E and copper.

Ingredients for a vegan egg not looking so weird now is it. That’s the trouble with second hand food.

How many ingredients is that?

Tony Bishop-Weston

Consultant Executive Vegan Chef, Author, Speaker Foods for Life Nutrition and Health Consultancy

Tony & Yvonne Bishop-Weston can be reached via www.newforesthealth.com