Back when I was a teenager, I had a dalliance with vegetarianism, something that was a bit harder in the late ’90s when the options were a little more limited.
I faded out for a bit. But then, by the time I got to college, I jumped back into it. I was pretty hardcore about it for a long time, I never went full-on vegan, but vegetarianism was something I embraced through much of my 20s.
By my 30s, though, I faded out of it entirely, with the end point happening partly as a result of a vacation rule that kind of ruined my wife and I—eat like the locals. We did that one time, and despite periodic tinges of guilt, we haven’t looked back since.
But even if I'm no longer vegetarian, I still keep an eye on it, because I find the phenomenon interesting from a problem-solving perspective: How do you get the same quality of meals without access to the same kinds of binders and ingredients a traditional meat-eating household might have access to?
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Perhaps that’s why I saw something in the YouTube channel Sauce Stache, created by vegan cooking enthusiast Mark Thompson. Despite his brand associating him with sauces, his claim to fame is actually his ability to convincingly cook meat analogues in a variety of contexts—both with more traditional meat analogue options like seitan (a.k.a. wheat gluten), mushrooms, and tofu, and with more experimental options like jackfruit, radishes, and beets. (He once even made a watermelon “ham.”)
The secret is his knowledge of both seasonings and the chemical properties that he could exploit to shape a carrot into a specific flavor tone. He knows just what’s necessary to give a potato in a blender a melted-cheese-like texture.
While always into vegan cooking, one gets the impression that at least some of his very narrow focus was driven by the algorithm. As long as he kept making new ways to turn an obscure vegetable into a convincing-looking steak sandwich, he was riding high.
I ended up binging the guy’s work for a couple of weeks about a month ago. And I won’t lie, it got me to try my hand at cooking with tofu for the first time in about a decade.
So imagine my shock when, yesterday, Thompson shared a video titled “Why I STOPPED Eating Fake MEAT.” This would be like a metalhead loudly announcing that they now only listen to smooth jazz.
While his point was that he is skipping out on the processed Impossible or Beyond-style fake meats, it becomes clear from watching that he’s just kind of sick of the whole thing.
While still a committed vegan, he very clearly changed. In recent years, he has lost a dramatic amount of weight, an amount that is extremely noticeable, to the point where each of his new videos essentially has comments from people in disbelief that it’s the same guy. He has shifted his focus in significant ways. And given that the guy is clearly as committed to veganism as he appears to be, it’s got to be a little annoying to pretend to be eating meat all the time, right?
One reason he pointed to was that meat analogue innovations have begun to hit a plateau after a period in the mid-2010s where it seemed like new innovations were emerging every couple of months.
“There hasn't been really any new tech or exciting new discoveries for things that I feel that I could show and be excited about,” he said in the video. “I can keep making these plant-based meat recipes, but at this point I feel like I would just be repeating myself.”
He rode the vegan meat analogue wave for a long time, and his old videos are likely going to be very valuable for people who want to ride that wave themselves. But if you were stuck turning chickpeas into meatloaf every week for like eight years, you would get sick of it too, right?
The thing is, trying to find new lanes for yourself can be stressful when you’re trying to work within a narrow algorithmic context. I recently spotted a channel, known for tech reviews of random gadgets, attempt to do a hard pivot to long-form storytelling around a broader technology issue. And while the video was interesting, it didn’t get very many views. That creator will have to do a lot of heavy lifting to get themselves back to the level that they were at previously.
All of this is to say that algorithms reward specific interests, but punish people because they aren’t quite as robotic as the algorithm is. We know that a basic math problem is always going to be solved one simple way, that a material like steel is likely going to have the same material properties. But humans are more malleable.
I think a lot about creators who are primarily woodworkers but have been forced to spend their work lives modding video game consoles because that’s what the algorithm told them their viewers wanted. Or music fans who find themselves talking about literally every band, ever, because they need to cover every nook and cranny of an algorithm that insists they must have an answer for each music-related topic. Or creators who sound so bored with the topic they’re covering that they don’t even bother to give their videos a proper ending.
At what point does a genuine interest become an “interest analogue”—a seemingly real interest that you fake because you have to work in a specific cultural context?
Are the people we watch actually interested in these things that they talk about, or do they just say they are because that’s what algorithms demand of them?
Like my shifting interest in vegetarianism, algorithms should allow creators to fall out of hobbies and interests without punishing us. We are not seitan-making machines.
Non-Vegan Links
I’m not the biggest Green Day fan in the world, but let me just say that this Dookie Demastered thing they built, where they put their breakthrough album on a variety of obscure or forgotten formats, is absolutely brilliant. I’ve actually covered most of the formats they used in one way or another, including X-ray records. I had not considered the Big Mouth Billy Bass as a distinct musical format, however.
I got a kick out of seeing Technology Connections cover the Duracell PowerCheck, a technology I covered a few years ago. Where I focused on the legal/patent element of that conflict, he emphasizes the science that makes it work. It’s pretty rad.
Matt Mullenweg’s handling of the WordPress saga, especially the “if you’re not on board with us, quit” element, are very reminiscent of what happened at BaseCamp/37signals back in 2021, which makes it all the more darkly humorous that David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), 37signals’ co-owner and the creator of Ruby on Rails, came out against Mullenweg’s actions this week.
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And see you with another piece soon.
