Selling Veat® in Dubai

Wandering through the local hypermarket about a month ago, a young lady was handing out free samples of veat^® on toothpicks. Veat^® is a Western concept: vegetarian meat. A fair number of Westerers were raised on meat, and feel that no meal is complete without a chunk of it; some of these Westerners, however, have heard that a field of soybeans eaten as soybeans can feed six times as many people as it can if it is first processed into meat by a steer, lamb, or pig. So a small percentage of Westerners feel guilty about eating meat.

To allow these people to dine guilt-free for as long as their vegetarianism lasts (usually, not very), various companies have figured out how to process soybeans into something other than tofu, into something that, very vaguely, resembles meat.

In the Orient, people raised as meat eaters are told that it is their God given right to eat meat, and they must never feel any guilt about eating it. In fact, should they feel any guilt about eating meat, they should feel guilty about feeling guilty.

Of the many people in the Orient raised as vegetarians, they have never had any desire to eat dead flesh, or any desire to eat something made to resemble dead flesh.

Which means that veat is of very limited appeal in Dubai, except for the few Westerners of the 'I feel guilty about eating some poor animal that's been killed' school that happened to have wandered far East of their native element.

So, after one week, the hypermarket had all its veat on sale, about a kilo of soy moulded to look like boneless chicken, for about £1. Which is quite a bit less than the cost of actual boneless chicken. So, in the interests of frugality, I bought the lot.

Cooked with lots of onion, garlic, sesame oil, and chilli, it tastes very much like onion, garlic, sesame oil, and chilli. But it was cheap.