Heura? - Vegan I can't believe it's not chicken

fat bloke

https://www.foodsfortomorrow.com/en-GB/buy-heura-vegan-food

Anyone ever heard of this? Came across it in a restaurant in Barcelona. Absolutely delicious. Very reminiscent of pan fried chicken. Haven't seen it anywhere else before or since and not a while lot of about it on the web even.

Tar.Aldarion

What restaurant was it in there? Never heard of it. Best one I've had so far is





They started selling one of their products in Stephens green vegan supermarket, but it's 6e for 160g haha!

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Vegans pretending to be meat eaters.

I nearly chocked on my fruit based orange

But seriously, why are vegans ashamed of eating veggies and keep pretending to the outside world that they eat meat.

For full disclosure..I'm an omnivore

fat bloke

Oddly, it was downstairs in the tourist office in Plaça de Catalunya. Everything we had was lovely, 3 courses for like 11 euro. But the heura was the winner. Crispy and salty and a lovely texture. Not at all like the eggy/soy quorn experience, of which I'm not a big fan.

Tar.Aldarion

Nadia Mealy Spring wrote: »

Vegans pretending to be meat eaters.

I nearly chocked on my fruit based orange

But seriously, why are vegans ashamed of eating veggies and keep pretending to the outside world that they eat meat.

For full disclosure..I'm an omnivore

Vegetarians and vegans aren’t necessarily trying to not eat meat, but trying to reduce unnecessary suffering. The not eating animal-meat just happens to be the result of this motivation. As eating faux-meat isn’t contributing to animal suffering, it does not conflict with an ethical vegetarian or vegan’s view.

gozunda

fat bloke wrote: »

Oddly, it was downstairs in the tourist office in Plaça de Catalunya. Everything we had was lovely, 3 courses for like 11 euro. But the heura was the winner. Crispy and salty and a lovely texture. Not at all like the eggy/soy quorn experience, of which I'm not a big fan.

Reading the ingredient list - the product simply appears to be made of a type of textured vegetable protein (TVP) molded to a varirty of shapes. The principle ingredient as with most TVP is soy and various flavourings etc.

The main issue I spotted was that it comes with the some rather vague claims on the main page regarding soy and deforestation such as

In addition, the soy we use to prepare Heura® products comes from crops that do not promote deforestation.

Tbh - that statement us about as vague as it gets. True that soy is grown in a number of regions including the US and South America but without a bit more substantial information - I reckon you could take that with a bucket of salt tbh

That was followed by:

Good for you and good for the planet: producing Heura® requires significantly fewer resources than producing the equivalent amount of animal meat.

Again the issue with that is that the claims are incredibly vague. Many of these type of calculations in my experience appear to leave out such details as food miles / transport of these products etc They also tend to use US figures to compare with meat production. I note in this they also do not specify what type of 'meat' they refer to either. Chicken for example is has a much lower carbon footprint than US style intensive beef production.

I did find one additional page with some further figures but again they appear to be cherry picked for example where they chose to bizarrely compare water requirements for 'veal' with their own product.

They also make the claim that (globally) "Livestock produces more greenhouse gases than all cars, trucks, trains, ships and airplanes". This is an often repeated but incorrect claims a few years ago - this has now shown to be untrue and the data incorrect.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/climatechange/7509978/UN-admits-flaw-in-report-on-meat-and-climate-change.html
And
https://www.quora.com/Does-agriculture-really-account-for-51-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions

The other thing that has got to be said is that no cultivation and harvesting processes are suffering / 'cruelty*' free'. Both cultivation and harvesting involve the death and destruction of many organisms and animals. This is a known. Animal agriculture here is very strictly controlled with a raft of regulations and inspection which must be adhered to. Where there are exceptions is unusual in my experience. I know others may disagree on that.

*The definition of the word 'cruelty' appears to have many permutations eg from the dictionary which gives it as "inhuman treatment". That which some others might detail as any animal farming whatsoever or as in the case of some groups even the keeping of any captive animals such as pets.