Way back, during one of my several fairly serious flirtations with vegetarianism, I used to eat
"slices" with mustard on rye. I called it a "sanswich." These were not good, obviously, but at least they possessed slightly more verisimilitude than did an old ex-roommate's version of the sanswich, NotDogs with UnKetchp and Nayonnaisse, whch were not so much food as they were black matter, or antimatter, a hole in space where food was supposed to be.
Nowadays I do eat meat, but I don't eat pork, so we do consume a fair amount of sem-substitute meat product in this house, chicken chorizo and the like. The kids eat beef baloney or fancy leash-walked turkey slices at lunch. I can't, and also won't, eat meat of unknown provenance, mystery meat, or this:
Now, though, with the kids going to a preschool that is not only Jewish but physically located inside a synagogue, with its invisible anti-unsourced meat force field at the door, we are forced to go veg at lunch. Which is fine, but I resisted at first. It's hard enought ot get preschoolers to eat without adding outside restrictions, so I thought I'd fool 'em, not with Poreef, of course, but with faux-fu.
I bought some fauxloney and some, I think, SmartDogs, and made a couple of sanswiches and placed them, without comment, in front of the children. The doglike thing, I swear they could not see. They did not so much as glance at it. The sliced thing, my more adventurous eater picked up, brought partway to his mouth, and then looked apalled and lowered it abruptly. "This smells wrong," he observed, accurately.
I ended up palming the packages off on our nanny, who is an adult and eloquent and fully able to express what is wrong them-- the rubbery, too-homogenous snausage of a hot dog replacement; the slices with their thin veil of spice and smoke flavoring hovering in the air just above the tasteless slab of Soylent Brown protein paste-- but she is a vegetarian and so has to think of them as food. The children aren't, and don't have to, and also, clearly, won't.
