It’s not meat, but it looks like meat.

It’s not meat, but it tastes like meat.

It’s not meat, but it feels like meat.

It’s not meat, but the more it looks and tastes and feels like meat, the more eating it is like having sex with rubber blow-up dolls: Both are the simulacra of primal adventures for which we are born and built. For very different reasons, in each case we choose the version without flesh and blood.

One skill that sets apart our species from all others is counterfeiture: We excel at fashioning imitations, simulations, analogues. Whatever we don’t or can’t – or tell ourselves that we don’t or can’t – possess, we make a fake to replicate. We are so good at this as to have changed the very meaning of reality. So just as sex with blow-up dolls – and, to be all-inclusive, latex rods – is sex, and sounds and feels and looks (just squint) like sex, fake meat is real. It’s real fake meat.

When we quit eating animals, why keep eating what looks/tastes/feels like animals? What is it that we still yearn for from meat, about meat, in fake meat? Lifetimes of barbecues and baseball games and beach parties and holidays have programmed our nostrils to flare at the sweet-salt smell of seared fat before our consciences kick into gear and holler No. When bacon curls, our salivary glands perk up unbidden, just like being publicly aroused in middle school. When we choose fakes, what battles rage inside our bodies and our heads?

What of sex with live partners is absent when we have it with lifelike replicas? Let’s see: Emotions. Microbes. A response. What of eating animals is missing when we eat Tofu Pups? Gristle. Guilt over farms and slaughter. Fear of cancer, heart disease, global ruin.

It is a testament to human genius and human chicanery that we make fakes to fool parts of ourselves. Some we adopt in secrecy and shame and desperation: sex dolls, say, or Rolex knockoffs. Others, such as fake meat, we embrace for reasons ethical, medical, psychological, political and philosophical. Eating fake meat, becoming carnivores in pantomime, summoning skin, blood, bone, organ and offal without skin, blood, bone, organ or offal, we do the equivalent of squinting, squirming, sighing, sliding back and forth against something which we do and do not want to remember is not real. It plays its part. It flexes, gushes, yields.

Proud of our cleverness and dedication, we’ve turned patties, tubes, strips, chunks and roasts fashioned from tofu, gluten, legumes, grains, nuts, vegetables and fungus into one of the food industry’s fastest-growing sectors. Burger King launched its BK Veggie Burger in 2002, in collaboration with Kellogg’s Morningstar Farms. With the help of Hain Celestial, McDonald’s launched its McVeggie Burger in 2003. Fake meat is fast now, and fake meat is easy, and fake meat is everywhere.

Even so, it has its enemies. These antimeat absolutists argue that scooping Soyrizo into a taco, say, still counts as eating meat in spirit and thus marks the eater as a hypocrite. In real life and online, arguments rage over this premise that shunning meat should mean shunning not only meat itself but the very idea of meat, including its juicy, smoky, chewy facsimiles. In this view, word and deed are not enough. In this view, vegetarians are nobler/purer/kinder than carnivores and vegans are nobler/purer/kinder still, and the noblest/purest/kindest of all shun even every gesture commonly associated with meat, such as dipping long objects into tartar sauce and placing flat ones between buns.

But where does this nobler/purer/kinder-than thou game end? If this were some other arena, we would say intention matters most. Does craving meat, even if we consume just a replica, mean we’re monstrous?

Science says no. In rejecting meat, we go against millions of years of evolution in which eating meat is what kept our species alive. As much as modern-day purists might protest, the biology of our teeth, intestines and cells informs us that Homo sapiens have always consumed animals. Tearing flesh from bones as suet slicks our chins is in our genes.

“The absolute fact is that we humans have meat eating in our history,” says paleontologist Neil Shubin, a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago and author of Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (Vintage, 2009).

“Our fish, reptile and mammalian ancestors were all carnivores and designed to eat meat. But we humans are a very omnivorous branch of the evolutionary trees,” adds Shubin, who is also  provost of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. “For example, our teeth are very generalized: we have cutting teeth in front, mashing teeth in the back that give us the ability to process a range of foods.” Thanks to a few thousand years of civilization, Shubin says, “I would classify modern humans as ‘choosivores.’ We have bodies that can handle diverse diets and many of us are fortunate to live in socioeconomic conditions where we can decide what to eat and what not to eat. And we have brains that can look beyond immediate needs to think of the long-term consequences of our choices.”