Herbivorous Butcher
When my wife was growing up and her grandparents lived in “Nord‘east,” it was not a hip, happening place. It was a bunch of separate Minneapolis neighborhoods sorted by ethnicity. Kinda different now.
Katharyn’s father grew up a short block from where the Indeed Brewing Company and Taproom now anchor the hipster mecca that is Northeast. As a boy he walked the 1-1/2 miles each way to school on Nicolette Island.
If you ask Google Maps for Northeast Minneapolis, you get the border on its bottom-left corner running along the railroad tracks that would be Second Avenue, if that road existed. On closer examination, the actual border of Northeast is 1st Avenue — presumably the middle of the road — because that’s where the cross streets, such as University Avenue, switch over from their SE designations to NE.
We ventured into Northeast to visit The Herbivorous Butcher (yeah, it sounded unlikely to us too) at 501 NE 1st, just inside the border. The place opened last month to widespread buzz, incuding in the international press. There the brother-and-sister founders claim to be producing vegan and gluten-free “meats” and “cheeses” unlike any others experienced (or suffered) by those in search of alternatives to food raised on the hoof.
HB’s marketing message says: “We have carefully crafted 100% vegan, cruelty-free meat and cheese alternatives that capture the best flavors, textures, and nutrients most people are used to without their negative impacts on health, animals, and the environment.”
We wanted to find out for ourselves what the excitement was all about.
Inside, the place is clean and modern, indeed resembling a butcher shop, complete with a butcher-block wall devoted to cleaver art. It was crowded with excited young folks — all much more hip than we are.
The roster of available small-batch food items changes daily at HB, and is listed on the website and Facebook page. The day we visited the feature was a rolled, stuffed “pork loin” and we snapped up the next-to-last one of those ($20), along with some maple “bacon” ($7) and a heart-shaped “mozerella” ($4.30), our visit being just ahead of Valentine’s Day. Oh, and a fresh-from-the-oven baguette.
We had the “pork loin” for dinner that evening and… neither one of us finished what was on our plate. We discarded the remains of the “roast.” Taste was disappointing. Texture was not entirely pleasant. Color was subtly off. What can I say? We tried the “mozerella” for dessert with a fruit sauce and it followed the same disspiriting pattern. The maple “bacon” is in the freezer and one day we’ll prepare it in a recipe where it is not the soloist but is a supporting player. Hope does spring eternal.
The baguette was excellent.
We are not vegans by any stretch: “enthusiastic omnivores” is more like it. Perhaps those who eschew meat would find The Herbivorous Butcher’s products more to their liking than we did.
Venture beef
Personally I’ll wait for a crop of Silicon Valley startups to weigh in. Over $300 million in venture money has poured into support for a growing roster of agricultural ventures (try this Google search to get a taste), many of which are hard at work trying to replace animals as the source of meat in our food supply.
Here is a lengthy profile of Impossible Foods of Redwood City, CA, a typical Valley startup bent on hacking the hamburger. This company claims to have cracked meat’s molecular code — it has analyzed and is able individually to control the nearly one-thousand elusive compounds that constitute the taste and texture and savor and sizzle of beef. Their goal is “Beef that’s better than any beef you’ve ever tasted… because we can turn all the knobs — anywhere we want. And a cow can’t.”
Val and I have tried both the Impossible Burger and the Beyond Burger. In fact she had Beyond Bratwurst today for the 4th of July, and I had one. We use this kind of thing as a occasional indulgence. (Partly because we think vegetables in their natural state are delicious, and partly because we still eat meat as well.) It’s fun to read this from their pioneering days.
I’m interested that none of the Nextdoor folks posted here. Maybe replying to a blog posting is too much of a hurdle? (Trained as we are nowadays to simply mash our cursors onto a heart?) They wanted to keep the discussion in the community?
A foodie friend with numerous food allergies says, “Lots of these [plant based replacement products] taste amazing as long as you don’t compare them with the thing they are pretending to replace. Just enjoy them for their own sake.”
I have had the Beyond and found it … indistinguishable, near enough; just what they aim for. We have not been back to Herbivorous Butcher, whose products ISTM fall under the description at the end of your comment. As you might have gathered from the piece, we went in with the hope and expectation of something amazing to out-meat meat. Didn’t find that.
I have noticed too the tendency of people to keep discussion to the social network they know. I assume that many of these folks came into the online life after the ascension of sites like Facebook; i.e. they never participated in a big way in blogging communities, say in the first half decade of the century. I have let go my hope that people will congregate here and am happy to engage wherever the discussion unfolds. In this blog’s first months, when I was posting a few times a week, a momentum and a community did get going here; but most of those people fell away when the postings slowed to a trickle. With a few exceptions (hello Linda G.!).
>happy to engage wherever the discussion unfolds
Is a great way to approach this. And I appreciate the way that the classic blog facilitates what I have been doing this week, “catching up.”
(Still worrying that it’s my browser … ) Several times during my catching-up odyssey I tried to subscribe, using the box in the right hand margin. Each time, I received, “There was an error when subscribing. Please try again.” But over night I believe the number of subscribers did increment. So you may find me on your list multiple times! (If I didn’t succeed, feel free to add me manually, using the email that starts with the number.)
Now I’m going to try to subscribe using the checkbox below.
Moving from QA back to reader-reaction: I appreciate that you write whenever you observe something interesting or become curious about a subject. Your interest and curiosity carry us readers along. THAT is what combines with your theme to tie all these pieces together. So that any length or posting frequency is fine.
Is it a coincidence that K & D are the blog’s initials, and your own?
> Is it a coincidence that K & D are the blog’s initials, and your own?
In fact it is. I didn’t notice until I went to make a graphic to serve as the site’s Favicon. Hmm, K D… where have I seen those initials before?
> So you may find me on your list multiple times!
Nope, you are not on the list.
I tried adding you from my browser and got the same error. No idea what that’s about. Maybe WordPress does not like an email address that begins with a number? If you have a different (alphabetic-leading) address you might try that.
Thank you for that tip! I’ve successfully subscribed using the “other” email. And WordPress kindly showed me the other three sites I’m currently subscribing to, using that email. Elegant! *sigh of relief*