There's a miracle health product you can buy right now, today. It has all the advantages of a vegan diet and none of the drawbacks. The best part? It's available without a prescription, without having to wait for a pharmacist, and without having to show a photo ID. It’s sold openly on the shelves of supermarkets and even convenience stores from coast to coast.
It’s plant-based peanut butter.
"Wait a minute," I hear you ask, "wasn't peanut butter always plant-based? And if it wasn't, what have I been feeding my children all these years? Goat-based peanut butter?"
Nah. It's all just marketing at a particularly gullible segment of the American public, that I learned about today reading a fascinating little article in The Atlantic.
My heart kinda goes out to the author, Yasmin Tayag. She seems like one of those well-meaning young people who has been taught all her life that eating meat was bad for her and even worse for the planet. Several years ago she made a New Year's resolution to eat more plant-based foods. "Doing so," she assumed, "would be better for my health, for animals, and for the planet."
And, thanks to "the rise of plant-based meat alternatives" from companies like Impossible Meat and Beyond Meat, it would be a "breeze to eat less meat but still satisfy the occasional carnivorous urge."
But, God bless Ms. Tayag, she just couldn't give up her real hamburgers. "Meat alternatives," she learned, "cost more than their conventional counterparts and are made with complicated ingredients that raise doubts about their healthiness—and even then, taste just okay."
The emphasis on "okay" was Tayag's own in the original. The girl likes her real beef — and can you blame her?
Where things get surreal is in that most American of pursuits: big corporations marketing their wares to people who, unlike Tayag, haven't taken the red (meat) pill.
Tayag wrote that "beyond the meat aisle, the 'plant-based' label lives on in virtually every food product imaginable: instant ramen, boxed mac and cheese, Kraft singles, KitKat bars, even queso. You can now buy plant-based peanut butter."
It's the same old Skippy Super Chunk or whatever but with the comforting "plant-based" assurance on the label. The label-based incantation makes it worth an extra buck or two to unsuspecting Millennials and GenZ buyers who have been taught so little that they probably think that steak is A) Evil and B) Comes from a plastic-wrapped styrofoam tray.
"Queso made from cauliflower instead of milk is correctly described as plant-based," Tayag concluded. "But if peanut butter is vegan to begin with, then what is the point of the label? And who asked for plant-based liquor?"
Um... I did — I asked for plant-based liquor. You can't make rye without rye, I assure you.
Mark Lang, a marketing professor at the University of Tampa, told Tayag that the "plant-based" label has been slapped on so many foods that would-be organic dieters and Earth-savers would never eat without any trickery that it has been "diluted to nothing."
This is where I must part ways with Tayag and Lang.
Look at this photo taken not too long ago in my very own kitchen.
The plant-based steak you see was created through an ancient, artisanal, and 100% organic art known as "metabolization." Through this process, an ordinary cow was able to transmute grasses into a ribeye steak so realistic that even experts are routinely fooled.
All kidding aside, unless you're eating rocks and dirt, all food is plant-based — if you go just one step deeper down the food chain. Congratulations, Yasmin — you've been eating nothing but a plant-based diet your entire life. So chomp into that next juicy hamburger without a shred of guilt, remorse, or shame.
And share the good news with your friends, too.
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