Fake Meat So Good It Will Freak You Out

The first time a vegetarian tastes Beyond Meat’s ersatz animal flesh, he’ll feel delighted and queasy at the same time. There’s something about the way these fake chicken strips break on your teeth, the way they initially resist and then yield to your chew, the faint fatty residue they leave on your palate and your tongue—something about the whole experience that feels a little too real.

“My first reaction was, if I was given this in a restaurant, I’d get the waiter to come over and ask if he’d accidentally given us real chicken,” says Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter, who has been vegan for more than a decade. “It has a plumpness to it, what they call a ‘mouthfeel,’ like a kind of fattiness. When you eat other leading meat analogues, they’re delicious, but you kind of know they’re not real. They’re missing something that’s hard to identify. This has a very realistic, meaty, delicious quality.”

I’m not a vegetarian, and I love real meat, but for various health and ethical reasons, I’ve long tried to cut down on eating animals. As a result, I’ve tried every fake meat there is. Every few years, a new one comes along, each promising unprecedented verisimilitude. A decade ago, there was Quorn, which is made of a fungus called mycoprotein and tastes pretty chicken-y. A few years later, there was Gardein, which has won many high-profile testimonials to its meatiness. (Ellen DeGeneres loves it.) My personal favorite fake meat is Field Roast, a kind of sausage that—to me—tastes nearly as good as the real deal. (A panel of Slate tasters agrees!)

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