Boca's Italian Sausage

You may not be able to tell by my expanding waistline, the piece of barbecue stuck in my beard or the Jimmy Dean sausage I keep in my back left pocket, but I’m one bucket of KFC away from becoming a vegetarian.
I blame this latest soon-to-be-failed attempt at personal revolution on my tofu-eating wife, who always seems to be a good person to take such heat. She doesn’t read my column much anymore and she rarely mixes with the three or four of faithful readers still out there -- my two grandmas’ neighbors included.
And maybe the best reason is that she is really to blame this time. It was only a couple of months ago that she returned from the grocery store with a box full of six little pieces of vacuum-sealed heaven the Boca company calls their meatless Italian sausage.
Prior to this fateful day, I subscribed to “The Tommy Boy Diet.” The main tenet is based on the classic Chris Farley comedy and says that the shrimp cocktail is okay if you can get it, but don’t forget about that Meat Lovers’ pizza in the trunk of car.
So everything was pork chops and pigs feet until we ran out of microwave corn dogs one night and I was forced to give these meatless sausages a shot. One minute and 30 seconds on full power later, our kitchen was filled with the distinct aroma of real Italian sausage.
“Okay, so their scientists had figured out how to copy the smell,” I thought as I slipped the sausage onto the bun. “That can go a long way in fooling less finicky eaters than I. When I bite into this thing and it tastes like a mustard-coated rubber ducky, I will really have something to complain about when my wife comes home.”
But guess what? It tastes fantastic. It tastes exactly like the real thing, only with a lot less fat and cholesterol. I had to eat two that night to make sure I was getting my daily allotment of fat and cholesterol, but still I was ahead of the game.
That sojourn in soy satisfaction has led me to try Boca’s other meatless products, most of which are extremely edible. Strangely enough, the bratwurst is the only clunker in the product line. Apparently something’s lost in the soy sausage translation from Italian to German.
This sudden realization that dead animals aren’t the only things that taste good couldn’t have come at a better time. With Bird Flu bound to makes its entry into the U.S. stowed away under the extra-crispy coating of some imported chicken product, I’ll be glad to stockpile all the tofu I can get my non-greasy little hands on.
I’ve also been traumatized for a long time by the mind-expanding thought of just how many chickens there are in this world at any given time, considering the vast number of chicken products that are consumed each day -- sandwiches, nuggets, wings, kung pao, noodle soup, legs and strips. I’m pretty sure more chickens are born each day than people than people, and for some reason that scares the cluckety-cluck out of me.
If I can avoid getting sick and killed by choosing the non-dairy, meatless microwave burrito over the cheesy chicken one, I’ll go with the bird-less one any day.If you carnivores want to laugh and call me a vegetarian, that’s fine with me. I’ll still have my Meat Lovers’ pizza in the trunk.