There are vegetarian foods that are designed to imitate the look, taste and texture of meat. Generally speaking, these foods are highly processed, and are not a healthy substitute for meat. By hasty generalization, I generalize that the vegetarians who eat such foods are not doing so for health reasons, but for the sake of compassion.

Some people question whether the vegetarians who eat these sort of vegetarian food really become vegetarians for the sake of compassion, since they are still have the desire to eat meat. However, I do not think it is problematic. The desire to eat meat does not necessarily imply a desire to take lives. I suppose their motto is "When the buying stops, the killing will too." If you have issues with vegetarians who eat imitation meat, I'll suppose you'll have issues with people who eat imitation sharks fin too.

One loophole in the motto "When the buying stops, the killing will too" is that stealing shark's fin soup is actually fine, since you are not buying it. You also can't be said to be contributing to the demand of shark's fin, since you have the desire but not the ability to eat shark's fin. So one way to eat shark's fin and be environmentally friendly about it is to steal shark's fin soup from the restaurant.

I've once thought about this: how do the people who make and sell imitation meat know what they taste like? Then I recalled that one doesn't have to be a vegetarian to sell or make vegetarian food. Generally speaking again, most of the people who sell Muslim food are also Muslims, so maybe that explains why there isn't halal imitation pork on the market yet. (I await the day that one can order "nasi babi" without getting hollered at.)

So if we follow the standards of vegetarians, it seems like only the next thing to do to get the cannibals to make and sell imitation human meat. After all, having a desire to consume human meat doesn't imply a desire to kill humans. My eldest sister once said, "To know if a French restaurant is good, you must see if the French patronize it." Therefore, if you see many cannibals patronizing an imitation human meat restaurant, you'll know if it's really good. Of course, a small problem comes in when you want to find out which people in the restaurant are cannibals.

If imitation human meat becomes a hit, I wonder if the stem cell researchers would try to catch up by introducing consumers real human meat into the market. Sounds interesting. Would you want to try human meat?