Fiona Macleod
food
It was during a bizarre encounter between some Gauteng hippie-vegan types and the red-meat-and-beer-boep toughs who belong to the Phalaborwa 4×4 Club that I recently came across an exciting range of vegetarian convenience foods.
The Gauteng vegetarians/vegans, most of them members of South Africans Against Vivisection (Saav), were visiting up north for the release late last year of 30 captive baboons back into the wild. The 4×4 club members (bless their khaki socks) agreed to transport the baboons to the Letaba Game Reserve in their vehicles. (Considering that they were planning to camp out for the rest of the weekend in the reserve, and that their vehicles stank afterwards of baboon pooh, it was a brave undertaking.)
Saav members, who were instrumental in securing the baboons’ freedom, wanted to thank the 4×4 okes by preparing a lavish lunch, which for obvious reasons couldn’t contain meat. Instead they had fried a pile of vegetarian sausages and brought them along in a cooler box.
Come lunch-time, the group was lined up along the banks of a river-bed in the reserve, waiting for the baboons to settle down in their new surroundings. Everybody was ordered to be quiet and still. The 4×4 crowd decided to push off into the bush to braai some meat and drink a few brandies, so they never got to taste the vegetarian sausages. I am still wondering what they would have made of them.
Since then I’ve taken various dishes in the Fry’s special vegetarian range cutlets, schnitzels and burgers to braais in the Lowveld. In country where the manne drink beer and talk hunting around the fire while the women toss salads in the kitchen, the vegetarian fare always raises a few eyebrows. But the strange thing is that when the food is on the table it’s always the vegetarian versions that disappear fastest, slipped surreptitiously on to plates already piled high with VRAs (vleis, rys en aartappels meat, rice and potatoes the standard fare in Land Rover country).
In the city, where tastes are usually more refined, taking these vege-tarian foods along to a braai causes less embarrassment. A colleague swears by them because they’re packaged like meat and she no longer feels like a freak when she puts her food on the fire.
Veteran vegetarians, as well as carnivores who believe all vegetarians are really meat-eaters at heart but just don’t have the guts for it, snigger at the meat-like packaging. “They miss the point. The traditional packaging of meat is aimed at convenience. Being a vegetarian is a head-space thing: I just don’t like the idea of eating animals,” says Saav’s fundraiser, Alan Rolstone.
They may look like meat, but they certainly don’t taste like it. The Durban-based Fry Group Foods make their sausages and burgers out of a vegetable protein they’ve developed called Protam-H. Most of the soya-based convenience vegetarian foods I’ve eaten taste like cardboard or sawdust, but Protam-H is chewy and chunky.
And for those of us who don’t know tofu from toffee, it’s great to be able to throw your food into a frying pan and eat within a matter of minutes. Out in the bundu you don’t find fancy delis with all the makings of slap-up vegetarian dishes, even if you’ve got the time to follow the complicated, preachy recipes most vegetarian cookbooks seem obliged to publish.
When I was in my late teens, I became a convinced vegetarian. But because I’m such a lazy cook, I resorted to eating at least one slab of chocolate a day to boost my flagging energy levels. I soon blew up like a balloon, and gradually returned to eating meat to keep my weight down. Protam-H is high in protein, so maybe I have found a suitable replacement for the chocolate. But I’m still keeping an eye on my waistline.