![]() “We’ve tried every gelatin alternative,” says Bompas, who once set a 19th-century British steamship in 55,000 liters of lime-green jelly. While other gelling and thickening agents exist - corn starch, modified corn starch, tapioca starch, modified tapioca starch, agar agar, xantham gum, gum arabic, guar gum, carrageenan - many of those substitutes fall apart at high temperatures and crumble when they need to jiggle. ![]() ![]() Gelatin’s aura of, well, nothing has enabled it to slip into an array of foods, including yogurt, breath mints, gummy candies, and, as I learned on a recent Easter shopping trip, Peeps. “It’s such a weird, alien, non-food product.” “Gelatin is far removed from people’s conception of what is food,” concurs Sam Bompas, whose London-based art studio has created several enormous, gelatin-based installations. It was a starter kit for converted carnivores. Nothing in a wobbling bowl of Jell-O resembles an ear, eye, or anything vaguely suggestive of life, yet gelatin comes from the collagen proteins made by boiling down the hooves, hides, and bones of pigs, cows, and fish. By this logic, there may have been no meat product more perfect than gelatin. Chickens had to be boneless and skinless, beef crumbled and bloodless, and seafood eyeless and shell-less. The less meat resembled animals, the better. And every summer, at my father’s annual work picnic, we devoured hot dogs slathered in ketchup and relish.Īs first-generation meat eaters, we practiced willful ignorance. By the time my sister and I came of age in western New York in the ’80s and ’90s, we rarely ate meat at home, but we occasionally indulged in kung pao chicken or Big Macs after our weekly Hindi classes. My mother and her four siblings added in the eggs, onion, and garlic, but meat remained verboten. My maternal grandmother eschewed onions and garlic along with eggs and animal flesh. They were not particularly devout but steeped in the particulars. My parents were raised as Hindus in India. My family’s relationship to meat has always been complicated. This was his first time ordering any sort of bivalve, and when the creatures arrived, glistening in their alabaster shells, he grimaced. When I was maybe 8 or 9, my dad ordered mussels at a restaurant.
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