Sixty years ago, the Oscar for best short subject (cartoon) went to a Yugoslavian filmmaker named Dušan Vukotić. The winning film called “Surogat” (re-named in the US “Ersatz”) was a cartoon fantasy in which the whole world was unreal—it was brought to life by a bicycle pump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjWXxfZ252I
I think we can thankfully say that over the last six decades there has been some room for the true and the beautiful to breathe, though it seems that space continues to narrow.
The latest massive effort by the fake and artificial to conquer the world has been evident in the aisles of our favorite supermarkets: the un-meat movement. Fake food is not a new phenomenon. Imitation crabmeat, for example, elbowed its way some time ago into the fish department of the markets. But that was equivalent to Claudius’s sorrows coming in “single spies”; now we have his “battalions.”
The new fake meat movement seems to pride itself on being “plant-based.” My reaction to that is to proclaim that if God had meant for me to dine on grass, He would have made me a cow. And as a cow, I would have doted on the grassiness of the grass, and not cared a jot that it didn’t come to my feedbox in the costume party disguise of a hamburger or a pork chop.
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The man with the hammer treats everything as a nail, the saying goes. Something like that seems to be afflicting Eleven Madison Park in its new vegan incarnation. The restaurant’s chef and owner, Daniel Humm, is using the skills he brought to meat and seafood to whack away at vegetables.
Thus began Pete Wells in his New York Times review* [Take it from me, the whole review will be your best entertainment of the month.] of the $335 menu offerings at the above-referenced eating place.
Almost none of the main ingredients taste quite like themselves . . . . Some are so obviously standing in for meat or fish that you almost feel sorry for them.
A beet is made to stand in for a duck; the result being something that “tastes like Lemon Pledge and smells like a burning joint.” Wells wonders if a the summer-squash dish he was served was a stand-in for a lobster.
The ingredients look normal until you take a bite and realize you’ve entered the plant kingdom’s uncanny valley.
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I confess that today I ate radishes, scallions, tomatoes, mushrooms, broccoli, and onions—and guess what? They tasted like radishes, scallions, tomatoes, mushrooms, broccoli, and onions. And the chicken tasted like chicken.
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The other day I was assaulted by a network promo for a show called, if I remember correctly, “Battle of the Tribute Bands.” That has to rate in the 800s on the FICO scale of ersatzness. If the show is, as I presume, a crap contest like so many others on the telly, one’s mind boggles at the attempt to determine which of the fake acts is most unersatziest.
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Over a century-and-a-half ago, Lewis Carroll put the mock on the mock, with his particular logic:
Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, “Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet?”
“No,” said Alice. “I don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is.”
“It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from,” said the Queen.
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