I find fake meat depressing. I’m a vegetarian and somehow I’ve really never thought to myself, “This tempeh would be so much better if it had some tendons and veins in it, like meat does.” Does anyone? So fucking gross. And yet, Science continues to attempt to serve this apparent consumer desire. From a Time magazine story:

This spring, scientists at the University of Missouri announced that after more than a decade of research, they had created the first soy product that not only can be flavored to taste like chicken but also breaks apart in your mouth the way chicken does: not too soft, not too hard, but with that ineffable chew of real flesh. When you pull apart the Missouri invention, it disjoins the way chicken does, with a few random strands of “meat” hanging loosely.

A decade of research. Just think, in a few years there could be factories turning out fake chicken the way factories process chicken now. There can be fake vegetarian chickens for us to keep in our backyard, and of course the free-range vegetarian chicken will cost more.