I’ve yet to have a normal tasting (or feeling) vegan cheese or butter. The butter is always sort off, like the little shitty butter packs you get at diners that come on a cardboard trough with a film of paper over the top, and the cheese is like weird texture uncanny valley cheese. I’m going to propose a heretical perspective: real meat and real cheese are great, most vegan alternatives (impossible Burger aside, because for a burger it’s as legit as any frozen patty) are a pale approximation. I’d rather eat vegan or vegetarian meals that highlight things that are already vegan or vegetarian instead of eating a chemistry set.

Like sure, let’s do vegetarian cooking options, but I don’t want to have to add vegan processed protein extract to make it palatable. If plant protein works then use it, if a recipe needs animal protein, yeehaw let’s do it, but maybe not every single meal. I don’t need every vegan or vegetarian product to be bacon or cheese shaped or flavored, and it’s starting to seem like a fools errand. Anyone who unironically uses the word “carnist” may miss the point here, but what if we kept things clean and simple so that, instead of faking cheese, we brought the gospel of the roasted Brussels sprout (or the cricket flour or whatever) to the masses to offset pork and beef every meal every day?

Really, “vegan cheese that tastes like the real thing” -> Unless you get your cheese from a plastic wrapper in a box, I fucking doubt it, lol.