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Where's the beef? Vegetarian butcher eyes meat association membership

Tag：Vegetarian 2020-08-04 15:13

For a decade, Jaap Korteweg has been selling meat products. Mince, brats, burgers, bacon, kebabs, the whole shebang. Now, the Dutchman is looking to join not one, but two fraternities of butchers. But here's the snag: he refuses to kill livestock.

Korteweg is not your typical flesher. He doesn't carve up cows, turn pigs into pork chops, or dress poultry. In fact, no animals are harmed in the making of his case-ready meat.

He's one – arguably the first one – of a small but hard to overlook breed of specialty butchers selling meat made from plants, crafted to imitate the texture and taste of the slaughtered stuff. The Herbivorous Butcher, The Abbot's Butcher, The Very Good Butchers, you got the idea. Korteweg is De Vegetarische Slager, or "The Vegetarian Butcher," and he wants a seat at the table with his traditional counterparts. In meat-loving Germany, of all places.

The farmer-turned-entrepreneur has penned letters to the Federal Association of the German Meat Industry (BVDF) and the German Butchers' Association (DFV), a representative of craft butchers, seeking membership. The message was coupled with an application video posted last week on YouTube, which doubled as a manifesto for a meat revolution that sacrifices neither animals nor taste.

"My dream is to become the world's biggest butcher," Kortweg declares in the clip, before making his way into the kitchen, a cleaver in one hand and a bunch of carrots held from their green tops in the other. "If you love the taste of meat as much as I do, tell your friends about the vegetarian butcher who wants to join the German meat associations," he continued.

For a vegetarian business, this was an unusual move, if not totally unexpected given how fast the alt-protein space is taking meat mimickers from bland to banging. Meat impersonators, concocted especially to win over carnivore connoisseurs, are getting ever too close to the real thing.

Veggie patties now bleed, chickenless tenders have a chew to them, and mock pork fillings are fooling unsuspected dumpling lovers. Even steaks, long seen as the holy grail of fake meat because their fibrous texture is hard to replicate, will soon be coming to a printer near you.

Like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, purveyors of plant-based meat have made not only the impossible possible but the extraordinary ordinary as well. Today, their convincing concoctions are everywhere: supermarket meat aisles, fast-food menus, stock trading monitors, and probably your plate. Customers, more open to swapping beef with beans and chicken with chickpeas if their taste buds won't tell the difference, have come to expect the unexpected. Still, Korteweg's announcement caught people off guard.

"The superpower of cheeky humor," said one Tweeter. "Brilliant communication and marketing company? Check!" wrote another.

But Korteweg wasn't mincing words.

"Our request is a serious one," affirms Amadea Boneschansker, Unilever's brand manager for The Vegetarian Butcher. Unilever acquired the small business in late 2018.

Germany seemed like a rational choice for the Dutch enterprise, which has operations there. Germans are all about all things wurst, and butcher shops have long roots in the country. It also happens that palates are changing. More Germans are eating meat less frequently (only 26 percent consume it every day, according to a survey by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture) and taking well to tofu and fleshier types of meat simulacrums.

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