If people are so against the idea of pigs and chickens being chopped up why would they want to buy fake bacon with realistic visual streaks of pork fat, or soy meat that tries to replicate the streaky texture of cooked chicken flesh? Surely these macabre details that mimic the look and texture of dead bodies are just going to be needlessly disturbing for someone that objects to killing animals. Unless they still crave the real thing — and this is like some culinary version of a nicotine patch. Something to trick the mind and fend off those urges to lunge for an unsuspecting nearby sausage. I was not against the idea of people being vegan or vegetarian but I had an issue with those “fake meat” products. To me it seemed absurd —

如果人们反对切碎猪和鸡的想法，为什么他们要购买带有逼真的肉眼视觉条纹的猪肉脂肪或大豆肉的假烟肉，而这些肉又试图复制煮熟的鸡皮的五谷质地呢？ 当然，这些模仿尸体外观和质感的惊人细节对于那些反对杀死动物的人来说只会不必要地打扰他们。 除非他们仍然渴望真实的东西-就像某些尼古丁贴的烹饪版本。 一种欺骗思想并抵制那些冲动的冲动，以诱使附近的香肠毫无防备。 我并不反对人们是素食主义者或素食主义者，但是我对那些“假肉”产品有疑问。 在我看来，这似乎很荒谬-

“Oh just eat a real burger if you want it so much. If not, fine, eat vegetables. Vegetables are great!“

“哦，如果您想要那么多，那就吃一个真正的汉堡吧。 如果没有，可以吃蔬菜。 蔬菜很棒！”

But I was totally missing the point.

但是我完全不明白这一点。

Most people who decide to avoid animal products are not doing so because they simply dislike the taste or texture of meat. According to many studies, the most common reasons people give usually fall into three categories:

大多数决定避免使用动物产品的人都不会这样做，因为他们只是不喜欢肉的味道或质地。 根据许多研究，人们付出的最常见原因通常分为三类：

animal welfare

动物福利

health

健康

environmental concerns

环境问题

Furthermore, many vegans will openly tell you they actually liked the taste of animal products even if they lost any desire to eat animals. Disliking the taste or texture of animal products is much lower down on the list of popular reasons to eschew animal products. In the back of my mind of course I knew that avoiding meat was partly about what happens to animals. The idea of a vegetarian buying a fake sausage contradicted that assigned reason of “taste preference”. So for reasons I did not yet understand it was oddly irritating to me. Of course now looking back it seems blindingly obvious. The benefit of fake chicken is that it is not involving the suffering of… a chicken.

此外，许多素食主义者会公开告诉您，即使他们失去了食用动物的欲望，他们实际上还是喜欢动物产品的味道。 在避开动物产品的流行原因列表中，不喜欢动物产品的味道或质地要低得多。 当然，在我的内心深处，我知道避免吃肉的部分原因是动物身上发生了什么。 素食者购买假香肠的想法与“口味偏爱”的指定原因相矛盾。 因此出于某种原因，我还不明白这对我来说很奇怪。 当然现在回想起来似乎令人眼花obvious乱。 假鸡的好处是它不涉及……鸡的痛苦。

Even so, the question somehow still remains. If we vegans dislike what happens to animals so much, why do we still pursue such visceral reminders of animal suffering in our food even when it is vegan? These days we even have juicy vegan burgers from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods that can “bleed” a medium rare fake blood onto your plate.

即使这样，问题仍然存在。 如果我们素食主义者非常不喜欢动物身上发生的事情，那么为什么我们即使在素食主义者的饮食下仍会内脏地提醒我们动物遭受痛苦呢？ 如今，我们甚至有来自Beyond Meat和Impossible Foods的多汁素食汉堡，它们可以将中等稀有的假血“渗出”到您的盘子上。

Many of us have jumped to explain the fake meat conundrum as it being aimed mostly to satisfy non vegans or flexitarians. However, let’s be honest, surely vegan customers make up a small percentage simply because there are still not many of us around. Vegans are equally enamoured with the concept of fake flesh. The recipe pages of Gaz Oakley, Richard Makin and the Bosh! boys are filled with ever more ingenious ways to make our own meaty imposters. So what is going on?

我们中的许多人已经跳出来解释假的肉难题，因为它的主要目的是满足非素食主义者或灵活主义者的需求。 但是，说实话，纯素食主义者的顾客肯定只占很小一部分，仅仅是因为我们周围的人并不多。 素食主义者同样迷恋假肉的概念。 Gaz Oakley，Richard Makin和Bosh的食谱页面！ 男孩们充满了越来越聪明的方法来制造我们自己的肉类冒名顶替者。 那么发生了什么？

拟态 (Skeuomorphism)

This is a term that will be familiar to designers. The dictionary definition of Skeuomorph is as follows :

这是设计师会熟悉的术语。 Skeuomorph的字典定义如下：

Skeuomorph

倒影

/ˈskjuːə(ʊ)mɔːf/

/ ˈskjuːə(ʊ)mɔːf/

noun: skeuomorph; plural noun: skeuomorphs

名词 ： skeuomorph ; 复数名词 ： skeuomorphs

an object or feature which imitates the design of a similar artefact made from another material.

模仿由另一种材料制成的类似人​​工制品的设计的对象或特征。

“the pottery box with a square lid is a skeuomorph of a twilled basketry container”

“带方形盖的陶器盒是编织斜纹编织容器的仿制品”

an element of a graphical user interface which mimics a physical object.

图形用户界面中模仿物理对象的元素。

“note-taking apps offer skeuomorphs of yellow legal pads, squared paper, ring binders, etc.”

“笔记应用程序提供了黄色便签纸，方格纸，活页夹等的变形符号。”

Skeuomorphs are used in design for a number of reasons, sometimes they can be simply decorative and aesthetic to convey a mood. However they can also be used for more complex cognitive or functional reasons. An often used example is the Apple calculator on iOS. In the earliest versions of iOS the calculator app looked a lot like a physical calculator.

在设计中使用Skeuomorph的原因有很多，有时它们可​​以只是装饰性的和审美性来传达一种情绪。 但是，它们也可以出于更复杂的认知或功能原因而使用。 一个经常使用的示例是iOS上的Apple计算器。 在最早的iOS版本中，计算器应用看起来很像物理计算器。

You might wonder why would Apple bother to painstakingly mimic every detail of a real calculator? And this is not the only example. They also had wooden bookshelves for ebooks and leather stitched address books. All designed to mimic their real world counterparts.

您可能想知道，为什么苹果会费力地模仿真实计算器的每个细节？ 这不是唯一的例子。 他们也有木制的电子书架和皮革缝合的地址簿。 所有这些都是为了模仿他们的真实世界同行。

The short answer is people are attracted to familiarity. Of course people accept new experiences if there are some obvious benefits. However, asking customers to use a smartphone for a wide variety of tasks that they had previously done elsewhere was a huge undertaking. By providing familiarity through design it allowed people to feel comfortable to take that step into the digital world and at least still have some clue what they were doing when they got there. An easy intuitive understanding of these user interfaces was absolutely key.

简短的答案是人们被熟悉所吸引。 当然，如果有一些明显的好处，人们会接受新的经验。 但是，要求客户将智能手机用于以前在其他地方已经完成的各种任务是一项艰巨的任务。 通过设计来提供熟悉度，它使人们可以放心地迈入数字世界，并且至少在到达那里时仍然对他们的工作有所了解。 轻松直观地理解这些用户界面绝对是关键。

These days of course we are all too familiar with smartphones. Teenagers may have never even seen or used the physical “real world” versions of some of these products such as calculators, address books and so on. Meaning they only know the smartphone software versions. It therefore makes complete sense that Apple and other companies have decided to ditch the skeuomorphic design flourishes as they start to lose value. Notice how today the shadows have come off the buttons and they look flat. The LCD window at the top has been eliminated completely.

当然，这些天我们对智能手机非常熟悉。 青少年可能甚至从未见过或使用过其中某些产品的物理“真实世界”版本，例如计算器，通讯录等。 意味着他们只知道智能手机软件版本。 因此，完全有道理的是，苹果公司和其他公司已决定放弃仿形设计，因为它们开始失去价值。 请注意，今天的阴影是如何从按钮上脱落下来的，它们看起来很平坦。 顶部的LCD窗口已完全消除。

这和食物有什么关系？ (What has this got to do with food?)

It might seem odd to talk about food as design. However, processed food and even healthy homemade recipes are examples of human creativity comparable to design— using raw materials and making decisions how to craft products. These vegan foods such as fake chicken that tries to replicate the streaky texture of cooked chicken flesh, or fake bacon with realistic visual streaks of pork fat or bleeding burgers, they are all classic examples of skeuomorphism. Think of it as holding someone’s hand as they are crossing a bridge. For people new to veganism or people who just want to reduce meat, then this serves as a way to bring people across to something new.

谈论食品作为设计似乎有些奇怪。 但是，加工食品甚至健康的自制食谱都是人类创造力可与设计媲美的例子-使用原材料并决定如何制作产品。 这些纯素食品，例如试图复制煮熟的鸡皮的五谷质地的假鸡，或具有逼真的肉眼可见的猪肉脂肪或汉堡出血痕迹的假培根，都是典型的拟态。 可以将其想象为在某人过桥时握住他的手。 对于纯素食主义者还是只想减少肉类的人，这是使人们了解新事物的一种方式。

未来 (The Future)

What does this tell us about the future of vegan food? Well perhaps we will see the skeuomorphism trend for hyper realism start to wear off. Of course people are all at different stages of joining veganism so this will not happen especially quickly. I think somebody to watch is Derek Sarno, Executive Chef and Director of Plant Based Innovation at Tesco. He is using marinated whole ingredients like oyster mushrooms cooked on a BBQ with a cast iron pan to press a vegan steak. This is not trying to compete with the molecular level detail of a vegan burger made in a lab by Californians in white coats. The primary aim here is to be delicious not win an award in trompe-l’œil, and some of that undoubtedly comes from the flavour of the mushrooms. I see it as a bit like Apple iOS taking the shadows and highlights off their calculator buttons. It is OK to not be a perfect replica of what came before and instead explore a bit of freedom within this new world. Similarly if we see Tabitha Brown and the viral reaction to her “carrot bacon” on Tik Tok, it gives us a clue about what the younger generation find fascinating. Fake bacon already exists in the supermarkets with skeuomorph fat streaks, but that realism is kinda old, what is interesting is the idea of bacon made from just marinating whole carrot slices. Vegans these days are well versed in the fact that healthy means a diet rich in mostly whole plant foods, not lots of highly processed fake meats. I think this trend for whole foods with minimal processing will be critical. It is also likely that the old metaphors that link vegan food to animal products will in some cases be let go completely. People are already beginning to experiment more with newfound ingredients like Aquafaba (chickpea water) to the extent there are entire blogposts about it. Social Media is obviously going to play a big part and that means we will see home cooking moving into the territory of almost “food alchemy”. The focus will be on simplicity and health — so the ingredients might be quite basic and focus mostly on whole plants. The innovation will perhaps come more from the clever way to combine ingredients and and manipulate their physical properties perhaps even with totally new tools or methods. More people will likely grow their own food too, even in small apartments without a garden.

这对素食食品的未来有什么启示？ 好吧，也许我们会看到超写实的拟态趋势开始消失。 当然，人们都处在加入素食主义的不同阶段，因此这不会很快发生。 我认为值得关注的人是特易购(Tesco)的执行厨师兼基于植物的创新总监Derek Sarno。 他正在使用腌制的全部食材，例如用铸铁锅在烧烤架上煮熟的牡蛎蘑菇来压制纯素食牛排。 这并不是要与加州人在实验室里穿着白大褂的纯素食汉堡的分子水平细节竞争。 这里的主要目的是要美味而不是在trompe-l'–il中获得殊荣，其中某些无疑来自蘑菇的味道。 我认为它有点像Apple iOS的阴影并突出显示了计算器按钮。 不能完美地复制以前的内容，而应该在这个新世界中探索一些自由。 同样，如果我们看到塔比莎·布朗(Tabitha Brown)以及提克·托克(Tik Tok)对她的“胡萝卜培根”产生的病毒React，也为我们提供了一个有关年轻一代引人入胜的线索。 假腊肉在超市中已经存在带有skeuomorph脂肪条纹的假腊肉，但是这种现实有点古老，有趣的是，仅腌制整个胡萝卜片就可以制成腊肉。 如今，素食主义者非常精通，因为健康意味着饮食中应富含全植物性食物，而不是大量经过高度加工的假肉。 我认为，这种要求最少加工的全食品的趋势将至关重要。 在某些情况下，将纯素食品与动物产品相关联的旧隐喻也有可能被完全抛弃。 人们已经开始尝试更多新发现的成分，例如Aquafaba(鹰嘴豆水)，因为有关它的整个博客文章都在此范围内。 社交媒体显然将发挥重要作用，这意味着我们将看到家庭烹饪进入几乎“食物炼金术”的领域。 重点将放在简单性和健康性上，因此成分可能非常基础，并且主要集中在整个植物上。 这项创新或许将更多地来自巧妙的方式来组合成分并控制其物理性质，甚至使用全新的工具或方法。 甚至在没有花园的小公寓中，也将有更多的人自己种植食物。

There will be new traditions and new ways of thinking entirely born out of the vegan playbook. This is just the beginning.

纯素食剧本将催生出新的传统和新的思维方式。 这仅仅是开始。

Giles Mitchell is a British industrial designer based in Germany with a passion for vegan food.

吉尔斯·米切尔(Gilles Mitchell)是一位总部位于德国的英国工业设计师，对纯素食食品充满热情。

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