Observations-Fake Meat

There has been a deluge of fast food companies capitalizing on the development of vegetarian meat replacement products and offering fake meat products on their menus. They are doing this in response to the demand of those who have chosen the vegetarian diet and lifestyle.

The response has been quite good, people like the product. Comments like: it tastes just like a real hamburger; you really won’t miss the animal protein; it is so much healthier and yet it still gives me the satisfaction of eating meat.

If you miss meat so much, why don’t you just eat meat?

People change their diets to a vegetarian one for many reasons: religious, spiritual, health, and as a response to the environmental impact of meat production on the earth. I really have no beef  (😊)with that. It is their choice and they are much better than I for being able to live this way.

I do have an issue with why they are seeking to replace meat in all of its culinary glory: the taste, the unctuous mouth feel, the smell of animal fat charring, and the fibrous texture, by imitation.

I am an omnivore, you won’t see me turn down extra helpings of vegetables, but you also won’t see me replacing my meat consumption with faux meat. Even as I get older and I am cutting back on my meat consumption, I would rather consume more vegetables, fish, and chicken than consume something that came out of a test tube and tries to be a reasonable facsimile of meat. Mainly because a reasonable facsimile is not a reasonable facsimile.

The question has always puzzled me: why make something into something that nature had not intended in order to make you feel good about yourself? It seems every culture that has chosen to consume only vegetables have gone out of their way to create something meat-like yet is not meat. Tofu, seitan, tempeh, textured soy protein, jackfruits, beans, lentils, are amongst the many others have been used as meat substitutes, they have been successful to varying degrees but never completely successful. They tell me that the most recent attempts have been more successful.

It seems to me that those who have declared their intention to live as herbivores should hold on to the lofty standards of that lifestyle. There is a large amount of resolve and discipline in becoming and staying a vegetarian; it is indeed a large sacrifice and an intellectual commitment to the rules of whatever form of vegetarianism they claim. It feels like cheating, in my mind when you create substitutes for meat, you are saying: I don’t really want to give up all the gustatory pleasures of eating meat, I just want to not eat meat while I still can derive the same pleasure. It seems contradictory and bordering on the hypocritical.

It is my experience that Asian cultures have tastier vegetarian foods. The requirements of the various Asian religions have caused the Asian vegetarians to react the same way as the western vegetarian: create meat substitutes; even though the Asian vegetarian foods tastes much better and are seemingly more clever in how they disguise the fact that there is no meat in their recipes. Part of it is that the culinary traditions of the Asian cultures are not as meat centered as the western cultures. The amount of meat that are served in each dish is much less than that of a western dish: the proportions of meat to vegetable and starch in much smaller in the Asian culture than the western culture, so it was easier to disguise the lack of meat because there was less to disguise. Speaking for myself, I think the Asian cultures have also had more time to develop their clever ways of making a vegetarian dish - the western vegetarianism became in vogue only relatively recently. There have always been vegetarians in the western cultures, but they did not number in as large a proportion of the general population as vegetarians in Asia.

It is no wonder that the nouveau vegetarians are left hankering for meat replacements, they have much more to replace and their culinary techniques for vegetarian foods are lagging in evolution. But that still begs the question of: why even bother to do this in the first place.

Circling back to the original argument, if once one decides to become vegetarian, should they not be held to that standard of consumption, at least by their own conscience? Why is it that they allow themselves the right to declare as vegetarians and still cheat in order to sate their taste buds?

Believe me when I say that I am not claiming moral superiority because I would not be able to live a vegetarian lifestyle. I can live eating an omnivore diet that is heavily weighed towards vegetables, but I would not be able to give up meat completely. But at least I am honest about my foibles and lack of discipline and not cheat to pretend that I don’t miss meat.

I guess it is more of a moral and philosophical question than a culinary question. What does being vegetarian mean to a vegetarian?

Corporate Life-The Layoff

There comes a time in any working person’s life where the company they work for, large or small, multi-national or startup, is forced to reduce cost and cut back on the workforce, for whatever reason: loss of a contract, competitive pressures, leadership preparing the company to be sold, new CEO/leadership needs to make an impression, pressure from stockholders to improve profitability, etc. The downsizing is never easy, and the aftermath is always brutal, inhumane and never easy. Who decides who should be laid off and who are spared? Usually it is the worker bees that get cut, since it is usually the managers who make the decisions as to who to lay off, so they tend to protect their own. Those locations with the accumulation of the most powerful managers will tend to be spared the axe, while those locations that do not have a champion get hit disproportionately since workers in far flung locations are usually the blank unknown faces; they are easier to cut than people you see every day because there isn’t the personal connection with the decision makers. Older employees often get the axe more often than not because of the persistent youth movement that corporate mythology promotes, regardless of the unique expertise of the people being cut, the mantra is that everyone is replaceable, indeed, the accumulated salaries of the older workers also make cutting them yield higher return on the bottom-line.  Those factors are all variables and are uncontrollable in the greater scheme of the situation.

Regardless of the reason for the layoffs or for selecting who gets laid off, there is one thing that is within the control of those who are laying off people: how they choose to break the news and how they treat those who are laid off, that is the humanity and empathy shown by the decision makers. How the layoff decisions are executed and how humane the soon to be former employees are treated during the layoff process is often a referendum on the humanity of the managers and senior leadership of a business. It is also fair predictor of how fairly the employees will be treated in the future and how the senior management views the employees: as partners in the business enterprise or as indentured chattel.

I recently observed from the outside two very different approaches.

One is from a large health system. The health system cited the decline in reimbursement from Medicare and Medicaid as the driving force for the restructuring. The announced number of layoffs is 1% or the total 45,000 employees, or 4,500 people. The move was announced via a widely circulated press releases. The release also reports that the layoffs are going to take place over a number of weeks as managers and HR people try to ease the impact of the layoffs. It was promised that the corporation will do their utmost in relieving the pain of the decision. The news was publicized, and the health system took responsibility for what they needed to do. I am sure that there will be employment placement assistance along with the requisite severance and healthcare insurance packages offered to everyone affected. The points to note are that this was a planned restructuring, and the actions are implemented in transparency to those who are still employed as well as those who are being affected. How transparent is something that we cannot see or experience, they are internal actions that we cannot observe readily. but their intent was known at the very beginning and they were not trying to hide these layoffs from their employees, their customers, their shareholders, or the broader healthcare market.

On the other hand, I have experienced a few situations where manufacturing firms are being reorganized. One is happening in a similar timeframe as the situation above with the health system but handled completely differently. The number of people affected corporate wide is pretty small, below 100 workers. There was no press announcement, for fear that this information would somehow work to the benefit of their competitors or to the detriment of their stock prices. In fact, they kept the layoffs secret even from the managers affected. One of those who was laid off was in a meeting with their managers when HR came to tell them that they were needed, and their manager had no clue until well after the fact. One fellow was running a meeting when he was told to report to HR, he told them to wait until the meeting was over before he went and found out his fate. One manager had a day off and was told that she was losing an entire section by another employee who had enough wits to call the manager at home as her co-worker was being marched out the door.

This was more along the lines of the layoffs that I had the misfortune to experience. I was working for a manufacturing firm many years ago when there was a hostile takeover of the company board, and the owner of the firm, the son of the founder of the firm, was walked out the doors without being allowed to pack up his office. We were sitting on pins and needles for weeks after the board coup until some of the people at our site, the corporate research lab, told us that they had been alerted by the head of engineering with the news that the lab was being shut down at the end of the week; but the select few, those that they had informed, are being kept on. They were of course sworn to secrecy and were told to not come to work on the day when the company security was going to show up unannounced to layoff the rest of the lab.

When the day came, about a dozen of us had all cleaned out our desks and our offices. We had diligently left the computer hard drives untouched, and we were all sitting quietly in our offices when the head of engineering arrived with a handful of security people in case we got violent, and a truck full of cardboard boxes for us to pack our personal possessions. He was shocked to see the empty labs and offices; he was even more shocked when we didn’t even acknowledge the news in a way that he expected, no one cried, no one seemed depressed, in fact everyone seemed relieved that the wait was finally over. The security guys were relieved that they didn’t have to do the ugly job of clearing out the lab of our possessions.

No such luck in this latest instance. There was no warning, very few of the managers were aware of the impending layoffs. A good number of people who were selected were getting ready to retire, a few had filed their paperwork for later in the year, yet they were included in the bloodletting. The unfairness of it all became evident when  some others in the same situation but in other locations were spared the ignominy of being swept out with the layoffs; they were rather told to retire behind the scenes so that they did not have to go through the long, public, and forlorn display of marching to the parking lot with the contents of their office desks.

Looking in from the outside, it appears that the reorganization effort was done hastily, without foresight. The main consideration was speed, expediency, the reorganization of the top level management structure, the weeding out of the bottom of the food chain as  executed through the layoffs, but the middle level management structure was left To Be Determined, probably because they figured they would have time to make it up as time went on. In the period of a single workday, many managers discovered that they did not have any direct reports nor who they were to report to, nor which business unit they would be working in. More than a week after that fateful day, they still don’t know their own fate, other than the fact that they were fortunate in still having a job.

All too often, management types are so divorced from the reality of the day to day operations that their main and persistent belief is that people will get over the pain and suffering if you gave them money for their pain; any hurt feelings can be assuaged by an adequate severance package. They conveniently neglect the fact that those who they had cut are not just head counts, but flesh and blood people who are connected to their co-workers through years of working, struggling, and toiling together for the company; that this shared bond of their employment is more than just a job, it is what pulls them closer together as a team and that bond is strong, stronger than any bonds other than familial bonds.  This I find to be the most dominant myopia afflicting the American management class: their view of the company structure as abstractions of their charts and flowcharts which completely blinds them to the real people who occupy each of the boxes that they have sketched out so carefully on their wall charts.

Alas, one last boost of energy from the management came a week later, when the leadership released a video that is mandatory viewing for all the employees. The leadership emphasized their “excitement” in this, the latest program of the month, and how this reorganization will be the magic elixir that will revive and reinvigorate the company. Additionally, the leadership admonished the employees that were left to operate with integrity.

The irony is heavy here. I am very sure that “excited” is not a good word to use. In essence, the message is that the management is “excited” to disintegrate the livelihood of the families and the decision to throw them out into the streets was easily made and inconsequential when measured against the future profitability of the company, even though it was the efforts of those who were thrown out who put the company in profitability in the past.  Even if management does not care one whit about those who were laid off, it is certainly rubbing salt into the wounds of those who saw their colleagues and friends suffer through major emotional upheavals. This strategy will certainly breed the kind of loyalty needed that the management expect and motivate the positive attitude that the work force are expected to have to give it their all for the almighty company.

The second irony. One that is a little more subtle, is that while the management pontificate on integrity, they themselves are lacking integrity by being dishonest in the way that they executed the roll outs of these layoffs. I am sure irony is on the wane in corporate America today, at least in those industries that are treading water, the senior management probably didn’t even notice their unintended hypocrisy, or maybe they did but didn't care. 

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In the end, people are resilient, they will survive upheavals, some may even thrive as they step away from the oppressive environments that these management leaders seem to foster. I survived my dealings with the American management ethos, I hope the same for those who had to come face to face with it recently. Good luck to them all. Go team, Go!!