Meatless

Pastor Bill Elder turned 101 years old this month and is finally starting to take it easy -- though it wasn't exactly by choice.

Search the phrase "vegan person" on Shutterstock, and it will return 486 pages of results that would insinuate all vegans live a life among lavish spreads of ripe fruits and crisp vegetables, eating bowls of perfectly dressed salad, and basking their lithe bodies under an abundance of sunlight while donning perfectly bleached smiles.

Not long after Michael Symon and his sous-chef lugged half a veal carcass across Kitchen Stadium and Cat Cora cleaved the head off a barracuda with two hands in Iron Chef America's title sequence, the Chairman unveiled the day's secret ingredient: broccoli.

A future where meat is no longer murder -- but still, definitely, meat -- might be closer than most of us realize.

All hail the Sunion, a sweet onion newly arriving at supermarkets in 2018 bearing an almost unfathomable promise: No matter how finely you chop it, no matter how stale the air is in your kitchen, no matter what names it calls you (kidding), it will never make you cry.

The best way I've found to describe chef Will Horowitz's mystifying cantaloupe burger is by using a Star Wars analogy: Imagine you're at the Mos Eisley cantina on Tatooine and the barkeep informs you that it's binka burger night.

Over the years, we've been as guilty as any food-and-drink outlet of dispatching overzealous praise to the orthodoxy of meat.