Eat your QUORN: Are You ready for Artificial Meat Made from Fungus?

July 28, 2004

Marlow Foods Limited, the British makers, call it Quorn ?, a “Mycoprotein, a nutritious member of the fungi family,” that is low in fat, cholesterol-free and has high quality protein and dietary fiber. The detractors call it mold. Quorn is one of the latest instances of totally manufactured food to hit the US market.
It reminds me of that now classic science- fiction film “Soylent Green,” in which food shortages have forced the government to feed the population a diet of crackers, Soylent Yellow and Soylent Green, which turns out to be recycled human corpses.
Quorn isn’t made out of people, but it’s certainly a factory concoction. My vegetarian daughter Cynthia reads labels carefully. If there are more than 17 ingredients in something that looks as basic as a chocolate chip cookie, she won’t touch it. To her something with that many ingredients isn’t food, but a laboratory concoction cooked up by some mad scientist on the payroll of an unethical multinational corporation.
The scientists at Quorn aren’t mad. They were looking for an edible and nutritious meat substitute that might make use of waste products like sugar cane stalks, cassava meal, petroleum waste and manure (not that Quorn has these items in it).
If the idea of eating recycled manure is repugnant to you, be aware that those mushrooms you buy at the grocery store are probably grown on beds of sheep manure. Just remember to wash those mushrooms carefully if you don’t want to short cut the process, skip the mushrooms, and go directly to the straight poop.
Eating fungus is a delicacy. To aficionados, truffles are worth their weight in gold, even though they resemble some black blob sniffed out by keen-nosed pigs. So why not Fusarium venenatum, a fungus relative which is the primary ingredient of Quorn? Unlike truffles, which are scarce and grow in the wild by the roots of certain trees, the Quorn fungus is grown in huge vats in a clean factory laboratory and is a white, fibrous substance.
Quorn is made into a variety of products from Swedish balls (they won’t call them meat), burgers, nuggets, sausages, deli slices, pieces and mince. The last reminds me of a meatless soy product we buy in the health food section of Econo foods as a substitute for ground beef and use in our tacos. Since my wife is cholesterol phobic, Quorn sounds like a good alternative.
Sally Anne Voak, a British dietician, developed a special weight loss regimen for overweight Brits using Quorn which she claims got excellent results and even permitted moderate visits to the neighborhood pub as long as diet lemonade was included with calorific English beer.
Quorn burgers and sausages are less than 6% fat and are available frozen or refrigerated. The filets are less than 10% fat and come in various flavors including garlic and herb, lemon and black pepper. The ground form is less than 3% fat and
can be used in chili and spaghetti sauce. Quorn is one of those products that can be made to resemble almost anything, though the company’s web site doesn’t list any Quorn cookies.
American detractors claim eating Quorn causes nausea and vomiting, but though millions of people have eaten it, it hasn’t killed anybody, which is more than can be said for dairy products, peanuts, shellfish, and other allergens.
Considering the effects of the McDonald’s diet featured in the film “Supersize Me,” Quorn sounds like a
health food.
So far Quorn hasn’t made it to our Upper Peninsula grocery shelves. Obviously, though evolved from a fungus grown in nature and discovered in the soil near the Quorn factory, it’s a manufactured food. But have a look at that package of factory product sold as food on your grocery shelves. Does it have more than seventeen ingredients including preservatives, emulsifiers, artificial color and flavors? Considering the scarcity of “real” food in our stores, maybe Quorn isn’t a bad idea after all.