Genetic engineers breed tofu-flavoured chickens to capture vegetarian market

Tokyo (dpo) - Could this be a revolution for the food market? For the first time, genetic engineers from Tokyo University’s Faculty of Natural Sciences have succeeded in breeding tofu-flavoured chickens. Now, the meat industry is hoping to finally capture the vegetarian market, widely known for its extremely difficult customers.

“We have extracted the genes responsible for the tofu flavour from a soy bean and transferred these genes to our test chickens”, Tsuyoshi Hinamoto, who headed the successful experiment, explains while presenting his study results. “There is not even a difference in consistency between poultry and tofu.”

Yummy: Dish with meat instead of tofu instead of meat

Hinamoto’s tofu chickens are not far off from being ready for market. After all, initial blind taste tests revealed that nine out of ten vegetarians could not detect a difference between tofu chicken dishes and conventional tofu dishes.
The meat industry can now sense big profits: “It has always been a mystery to us why vegetarians and vegans would rather eat tofu instead of delicious meat, but now there is no excuse for them anymore. We will build giant tofu chicken farms and provide every single vegetarian in the world with cheaply-produced tofu meat.” Apart from other tofu-flavoured animals, the Japanese scientists are now researching into spelt-flavoured white bread, full-sugar diet food products, and salad-flavoured milk chocolate.
ssi; picture above: © monticellllo - Fotolia.com, picture on the right: Toddfast, CC BY-SA 3.0; first published 2017/05/22
Read the German version HERE.