If you are a low/no meat eater, how do you feel about meat imitations?

"virtuous vegans" seems to summit up for me

I did my vegetarian time, am fascinated by the studies by the high environmental costs of the 100 mile diet, and think it's now time to take the zero waste group seriously.

Ooooohhh, corndogs are good too!

Oh yeah, Thomas, you're a prince . . . and we all know it.

Yes, sure, but ... as a foodie, how do you feel about meat imitations?

3. if people aren't eating meat, I don't see the point of having pretend meat. Really. It just seems stupid and pointless.

Salatin showed me the barn, a ramshackle, open-sided structure where 100 head of cattle spend the winter, ever day consuming 25 pounds of hay and production 50 pounds of waste. Every few days, Salatin adds another layer of wood chips or straw or leaves to the bedding, building a manure layer cake that’s three feet thick by winter’s end. Each layer he lards with a little corn. All winter the cake composts, producing heat to warm the barn and fermenting the corn. Why corn? There’s nothing a pig likes more than 40-proof corn, and nothing he’s better equipped to do than root it out with his powerful snout. So as soon as the cows go out to pasture in March, the “pigaerators,” as Salatin calls them, are let loose in the barn, where they proceed systematically to turn the compost in their quest for an alcoholic morsel.

“That’s the sort of farm machinery I like—never needs its oil changed, appreciated over time, and when you’re done with it, you eat it.” Buried clear to their butts in compost, a bobbing sea of hams and corkscrew tails, these are the happiest pigs you’ll ever meet. Salatin reached down and brought a handful of compost to my nose; it smelled as sweet and warm as the forest floor in summertime, a miracle of transubstantiation. After the pigs have completed their alchemy, Salatin spreads the compost on the pastures. There, it will feed the grasses so that the grasses might again feed the cows, the cows the chickens, and so on until the snow falls, in one long, beautiful, and utterly convincing proof that, in a world where grass can eat sunlight and food animals can eat grass, there is indeed a free lunch.