Letter from Hong Kong

Plant based cheese

My local food store has started selling plant based cheese.

Now I'm not one of those folks who say that you can't make cheese out of plants, you can. You just have to pass it through a cow first, or if there is no cow handy, a sheep or a goat will work just fine.

Have you seen the list of ingredients for these plant based products?

A US dairy free cheese as an example,

Filtered Water, Organic Palm Fruit Oil, Modified Food Starch, Natural Flavors (Plant

Sources), Less than 2% of: Pea Fiber, Pea Starch, Bamboo Fiber, Nutritional Yeast, Calcium

Phosphate, Rice Flour, Vegetable Glycerin, Sunflower Lecithin, Sea Salt, Sunflower Oil,

Lactic Acid (Vegetable Source), Carrageenan (Vegetable Source), Calcium Sulfate, Citric

Acid, Enzymes, Annatto (for color), Xanthan Gum, Disodium Phosphate, Sodium Citrate.

And what goes in cheese? Milk, salt, a bacteria, and rennet. Butter is even simpler. Cream and salt. That's it.

The most amusing part of this is that the advocates of plant based foods are generally very green folks. Noisy and strident promoters of natural foods, of getting back to the clean and green and simple life, and yet they would prefer to eat a science project rather than food.

The spruiker at the store assured me that the cheese was made using activated nuts, and I had to look that up when I got home. I worried all the way in the taxi that my nuts were not sufficiently activated.

It's ok, you just soak them in water for a while and then dry them out. We used to call that going for a swim and sitting in the sun. Quite how that makes the cheese better, healthier, or more interesting remains a mystery.

I'm afraid I take the plant based dairy a bit personally. My father left school young, as folks did during the Great Depression, and went to work at the local butter factory. He rose through the ranks, interrupted by a few years service in the south-west Pacific during the war, and qualified as butter and cheese maker.

By the time I was three he was managing a butter factory and I can remember the thrill of following him around the plant. The separator rooms with rows of machines separating the cream from the milk, and then into the churn room where giant stainless steel balls churned the cream into butter, and the box room where woodworkers knocked up the wooden boxes to transport the butter to Melbourne to be packed for sale in Australia or export to the UK.

Apart from the box room the floors were generally wet and cool, even in the hottest part of summer, and it truly seemed a magical place, taking the hard work of the farmers in raising and milking the cows, and the drivers collecting the milk in the new refrigerated tankers and then an army of workers transforming it into a delicious and healthy product worth sending to the other side of the world to bring some joy to the miserable complaining Brits.

So for me it's never been just a product in the chilled section of the supermarket, and nor has meat. My father used to take me with him to the butchers on a Saturday morning and I loved watching the butchers cut up the beef and lamb and pork, and my Dad bantering robustly with them.

For all that, I can see why some people choose to be vegetarian, and there is plenty of great vegetarian food to eat. What I can't understand is why some vegetarians want to eat mock meat or cheese.

I have spent a fair bit of time over the last nine years as a patient of a local private hospital, and I am happy to say they do a good job, well at least they haven't killed me yet, and they have kept me alive when things haven't looked so promising. If it were an airline I would have enough points to be platinum for life. I think they made enough money treating me to pay for the most recent renovations.

Unfortunately the food is so bad that it makes me look fondly back to boarding school in the 1970s. You see the place is owned by the Adventists, and they are vegetarian through and through. Worse than that, they embrace the mock meat approach to vegetarian food.

I was out there for some tests a while back. I know quite a few of the doctors nurses and administrators well enough to say a cheery hello.

I was being wheeled around for another check and saw a doctor I knew in a crowded lift. He said he was sorry to see me back and before I could filter it out I blurted out, "It's the food, I can't stay away", and the whole lift erupted in laughter. It is such a running joke.

So my advice is to stay away from fake meats and dairy, embrace your vegetarianism, and develop a love for tofu and enjoy life.

Do what the Hong Kongers do. If it's meat for them they eat it, if they choose not to, they eat tofu and other protein rich natural foods. The fake stuff is generally only available in the expat type shops, for a reason. It’s an affectation of the spoiled well off westerner.

I enjoyed the Olympics, watched a bit in my local. The coverage here, as everywhere I guess, was skewed towards the sports of local interest and the events where China or Hong Kong had a chance of success, but I did get a look at the Aussie woman in the Breakdancing.

There has been some social media debate about her performance.

Professor Megan Davis, pro vice chancellor of the University of New South Wales, called out Gunn for being “disrespectful” towards other competitors by deliberately underperforming. The Australian Breakdancer and academic became a controversial Olympic figure after losing all three round-robin battles 18-0, 18-0, 18-0 against the USA, France and Lithuania.

“Getting zero points on purpose in three rounds for an academic study subsidized by the taxpayer both at a university and Olympic level isn’t funny and isn’t ‘having a go’,” Davis said on social media. “(It’s) disrespectful to other competitors. I’m glad most Aussies aren’t buying the Kool-Aid,” she continued, adding, “Affluent, comfortable life, educated, not a care in the world, nothing matters really, what fun, what a fun Aussie gal, chortle chortle,

Mmm. Jermaine Clement, one half of the wonderful NZ comedy series Flight of the Conchords took a different view.

I've been to Australia. That was their best dancer.

As in the Olympics themselves, the Kiwis punching above their weight.

Stay well.