Down on Hester Street, a dingy thoroughfare dominated by 19th-century tenement housing and Chinese storefronts, is the shop of the veggie butcher. When I was first told of the place, about six years ago, I pictured a dark, cold room with raw hunks of tofu hanging from steel hooks in the ceiling and, behind a seitan-stained counter, a man with a giant belly hacking off the choicest pieces according to customers' taste.

The actual May Wah Vegetarian Food store is a tidy fluorescent place with walls covered in wood paneling and freezers filled with faux meats of every flavor and design. Though most of May Wah's business is wholesale, selling to suppliers and restaurants worldwide (President Lee Mee Ng estimates that 50 percent of New York's vegetarian restaurants buy their faux meat from May Wah), individuals can shop directly from the freezers on Hester Street, which hold a mind-boggling array of imitation animal parts. You can get ready-to-eat dishes like Black Pepper Steak, Chicken Nuggets, and the ever-popular Citrus Spare Ribs. There are many versions of chicken, beef, and ham — sliced, filleted, balled, smoked, stewed, whole, with or without bone (generally a piece of cane sugar). There are seafood imitations of cod, tuna, squid, shrimp, abalone, crab, and even mock lobster shaped like, yes, a lobster. There are delicate dishes like sashimi and more pedestrian fare like burgers and hot dogs. Then, there are what I term "the exotics," animal foods so rarely eaten by Westerners that their vegetarian counterparts seem all the more surprising: shark's fin, eel, mutton, kidney, gizzards.

Medieval European chefs developed all manner of meat substitutes for the fasting days of Lent, employing ingredients like ground nuts, fruits, and breads shaped like animals. But the faux meats of today — mostly bases of mushroom, gluten, and soy — are predominantly creations of Chinese Buddhism. The owners of May Wah are Buddhists from Taiwan and that is where their products are manufactured. It's estimated that occasional and strict vegetarians account for 14 percent of Taiwan's population, and the country has become a Mecca of faux meat innovation.

On my recent trip to May Wah, I threw caution to the wind and purchased a package of vegetarian flitch. For those of you who don't know, flitch is the name of a number of foods ranging from potato candy made in the coal region of Pennsylvania to halibut steak. Most commonly, flitch is the abdominal wall of a pig's side, salted and cured or smoked. By the looks of the package, I wasn't sure which flitch I was buying. It turned out to be the pork kind, complete with a glutinous layer of white "fat." I decided to prepare it soul food style, mixed up with sauteed collard greens and a side of Southern fried corn. As a substitute for lard, which is used in traditional soul food greens, I cooked the flitch and blanched greens together in a mixture of olive oil, soy butter (in this case better than real butter, which would hide the bitter flavor of the collard greens and make them too sweet), and just a dash of smoke flavor. Having sampled many pig substitutes, this dish would work just as well with the "leaner" hams and bacons, but if you're really missing the chewy fattiness of a pork chunk then the flitch is for you. The more thinly sliced hams will also get nice and crispy but the sponginess of the flitch soaked up all the seasoning and oil without being too greasy. A cold glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade (topped off with a hearty swig of Jim Beam, of course) and I could almost smell the magnolia trees.

Modern vegetarians and meat-eaters alike have often wondered why some vegetarians enjoy eating food that resembles meat. Vegetarian gizzards? Ridiculous, you say. Disgusting, you say. Oxymoronic. Simply moronic. Why, if you have chosen to give up eating animals, would you want to eat anything that reminds you of the vulgar task?

Though originally created to entice meat-eaters and placate abstaining vegetarians, I look at faux meat from a marketing perspective. All epicureans agree that great cuisine is largely about presentation and vegetarian cuisine is no exception. It's a rare person who is tantalized by a menu offering Sliced Gluten with Artificial Seasoning covered in Sauce of Nutritional Yeast and Vegetable Broth. Doesn't Black Pepper Steak in Gravy sound so much better? And anyway, isn't the word "steak" itself a euphemism? I don’t quite like mock meat products that accentuate the negative with product names, such as "NotMeat" or "UnChicken." I much prefer the unapologetic lies of the May Wah products, which, like great theatre, affirm your suspension of disbelief and call the imitator meats by their real-life names. (And now, in the role of Chicken we have: "Chicken!")

Whether you like vegetarian food resembling meat or not, it is irrefutable that the attempt to create vegetarian animals has pushed soybeans and wheat gluten to the limit, challenging what a vegetarian diet can be, developing textures and flavors for vegetarians that were previously available only to meat-eaters. Whether they are a one-to-one substitute for animal meats is beside the point. What matters is deliciousness in its own right. Call it a rose, call it Tofurkey — the smell is just as sweet.

Stefany Anne Golberg is an artist, writer, musician, and professional dilettante. She's a founding member of the art collective Flux Factory and lives in New York City. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Asian grocery store photo from Jennifer Pickens via Flickr (Creative Commons), “Veg-o-matic” photograph by Eric Tucker/Getty Images, "Plate" photograph from FoodCollection/Getty Images.