First off, no “meat alternative” is going to taste like meat. Not really.
Fried chickpea burgers don’t taste like burgers. Fried potato/carrot burgers don’t taste like burgers. Cooked jackfruit doesn’t taste like a burger. And certainly, tofu does not taste like a burger. They can take care of the wish to eat fried food, or the wish to have some kind of filling protein, but they don’t really taste like meat.
Second, a substantial amount of Catholic medieval cuisine (at least in the West) was dedicated to making things that you could eat on days of abstinence look like things you couldn’t eat. And this was in the days when Lent meant abstaining from eggs and dairy products, as is still the discipline in the Eastern churches.
So yup, people used mushy peas as a butter alternative on their bread. They used almond milk as a milk alternative. They used almond pudding “cheese” as a cheese alternative, and fake almond “eggs” as an egg alternative. They made fish look like things that were not fish.
And to be honest, it actually underlines the sacrifice, because none of these things taste like the stuff they were skipping.
But we aren’t supposed to go around fasting with sad looks on our faces, so having some food “jokes” and alternatives gives people a bit of encouragement. It helps them eat the amount they need for their bodies to keep running, when the food would otherwise just depress their appetites. That’s not cheating; it’s kindness and generosity.
Mother Church allows and encourages it, just as many mothers cook strange recipes to help their kids eat their vegetables without being bored or horrified by them. And that’s why, in Catholic countries, every cookbook still includes a lot of recipes for Lenten dishes.
If you feel called to fast more strictly, and can do it safely, then that’s good and praiseworthy. You will be going into a stricter form of spiritual exercise. But making judgments about other people is not fair. This is not the Olympics; we are not all champion ascetics. We just should try to do what we can, out of love, and not worry about what other people are doing or what they think. God gives us all different gifts, and so we all work for Him a little bit differently.
on Ash Wednesday. It’s LEGAL 