The Rubber Rose Review

Consider upgrading your account to remove ads from your site and access enhanced blog features!

City living has some advantages. Not many in my book, but take for example Food Fight!, an all-vegan grocery store in Portland, Oregon.

This tiny little radical store carries nothing but cruelty-free products like vegan calamari.

Yes, you read that right: vegan calamari, made by Sophie’s Kitchen from Northern California (where else?)

What’s it made of?

Konjac, or Elephant Yam. A plant grown and used in Asia for hundreds of years. The Japanese see it as a healthy fibrous food. (Sophie’s Kitchen) uses the root of the plant for the start to make things like vegan calamari.

Some veganazi’s might say that vegan seafood is a hypocritical attempt at winning over wanna-be’s who can’t give up the animal products, but I don’t care.

I thought it was excellent and pretty close to the real thing (which I absolutely love…except for the tentacles!). Even carnivore hubby was impressed, which blew me away.

In my vegetarian to vegan transition, giving up seafood has been difficult. I love seafood. I just hate the fact that be eating it, I’m contributing to ocean depletion. This vegan calamari thing is impressive and I hope to taste other aquatic animal species knock-offs.

The other crazy meat knock-off I found at Food Fight was this Vegetarian Haggis.

Not being of Scottish descent, I can’t say I’ve ever tried the real thing or would ever want to. It’s pretty disgusting.

But then again, so is Menudo, which I grew up on, and until recently ate on special occasions with la familia.

So I suppose if I was Anglo and fond of this meat dish, one of the foulest sounding ones I’ve ever heard of, I would dig it.

There are some pretty neat things on the horizon when it comes to the vegan lifestyle. I think our society is at a turning point and even people like my husband are willing to go out on a limb and try things they never would have before. If not for health reasons, then for the simple fact that we all know how damaging eating animal products is to the environment.

And who wants to say they contributed to that?