Tofu and burgers...

The price for the biggest mystery in the veggie food rack has to go to tofu. Undoubtedly. When you buy this stuff in a supermarket, it has no taste, no colour and no smell. I don't know to what extent physical lingo is a part of your daily vocabulary, but this basically means that tofu is a culinary vacuum.

(phone ringing)

- Hello boss, you've got a minute there? I successfully extracted all flavouring and colouring from this product. What shall I do with the residue?

- Errr, what does it smell like?

- Nothing.

- Wrap it. Put a sticker on it that says 'tofu'.

My guess? Tofu is the biggest unresolved question within the field of culinary philosophy: apart from trying to figure out whether the poached egg came before the fried chicken or not, and whether a bag of chips in the middle of the forest is still crispy when there's no one around to taste it, academics should really be trying to find out whether tofu actually exists, or whether it's just a soy-based illusion.

Luckily enough, there's also burgers. Vegetarians have a choice between oodles of burgers. However, there's nothing worse than ordering a veggie burger and having to face the resolute meat-eater who feels the urge to point out that this is ridiculous, 'because you choose not to eat meat, yet you do buy things that look like meat'.

Listen to me, you bloody moron, since when is the round three-dimensional shape exclusively reserved for meat? The day you will start buying yourself cow-shaped pieces of steak, I will start to cook myself carrot-shaped burgers, deal? Thank God you're not the head of the 'Food for the Future'-think tank.

(guy entering the office)

- Hello boss, you've got a minute there? I just invented this new type of food, and I believe it's a winner: it's highly nutritious, very tasteful, super cheap to produce, can be grown in the most extreme weather conditions and has a negligible carbon footprint.

- Sounds interesting. What shape?

- Errr, I haven't really thought about that boss. Round slices, I guess?

- That's impossible: that's for meat.

- Ah. Erhm... square slices?

- Sorry. For meat.

- Balls?

(shakes the head)

- How about... cauliflower-shaped?

- Sorry, that's for veggie burgers.

(thinks hard)

- A collection of colourful interlocking plastic bricks, which can easily be stacked and rearranged?

(giving the are-you-serious-look)

- Dude, you're fired...