That evening, at Nick's house.
Monroe speared a piece of Five-Spice Vegetarian Chicken with his fork and examined it closely. "What is this? Why does it taste even better than the steak we had before?"
"Uh... it's a kind of imitation meat made from soy protein," Nick said, choosing his words carefully.
"Really?" Monroe's eyes widened. He ate the piece in one bite, then speared another to study it further. "The texture is incredible. Delicious and juicy. I never knew imitation meat could taste this good. Has the technology really come this far?
"Damn, if I'd gotten to eat this sooner, I might have stuck to being a vegetarian a little longer."
"Actually, similar methods of making imitation meat have been passed down in Cyrus for at least a thousand or two thousand years. If you like it, I can add a few more dishes made with soy products the next time we get together for dinner."
There was actually a rather counterintuitive bit of trivia involved here. Although America was the world's leading soybean producer, soybeans, which originated in Cyrus, had only really reached Europe and America for commercial cultivation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
There were now so-called vegan yogurts made from soy milk, as well as veggie burger patties and vegetarian sausages made from soy protein imitation meat-"healthy" foods championed by European and American vegetarians.
But much like the avocados that would soon take Europe and America by storm, most of these foods tasted, to put it mildly, questionable.
Many Europeans and Americans had encountered tofu to some extent through Chinese or Japanese food, but knew little about other soy products.
Soybeans, however, had been cultivated in Cyrus for over five thousand years. As early as the Shang and Zhou dynasties, they had explicitly