The Substitute Word

There is a word that has done more damage to the cooking of plants in the last twenty years than every bad fast-food chain combined.

The word is substitute.

You see it everywhere. On the packaging of meat-alternative products. On the menus of restaurants that should know better. In the writing of food magazines and the captions of supermarket aisles and the descriptions of dishes that are good enough to stand on their own and instead introduce themselves as the lesser version of something else. “A substitute for ground beef.” “A plant-based substitute for chicken.” “A vegan substitute for parmesan.” The word is so common that we barely notice it anymore, the way we stop noticing wallpaper.

But the word is doing something. The word is positioning the food, before the bite, as the second-best. The word is telling the diner: you are not getting the real thing. You are getting the version that is trying to be the real thing. The word is, in the structure of language itself, an apology.

I want to argue against this word the way I would argue against any piece of vocabulary that makes the food on the plate worse. Because substitute is doing exactly that. It is making the food worse. And it is doing it in a way that the food itself cannot defend against, because the framing happens before the diner even picks up the fork.

Start with the dish that taught me this. The milanesa.

I have told the story before but it bears repeating in this context. The milanesa traveled, over the course of a hundred and fifty years, from Milan to Buenos Aires. It started, in 19th-century Lombardy, as a thin slice of veal — cotoletta alla milanese — breaded in coarse breadcrumbs and shallow-fried in butter. When Italian immigrants arrived in Argentina in waves through the late 1800s and early 1900s, they brought the technique with them. In Argentina, where cattle were plentiful and veal was the obvious meat, the dish became milanesa de ternera. Then milanesa de pollo. Then milanesa napolitana, layered with tomato and cheese, which is, ironically, a Buenos Aires invention that has nothing to do with Naples.

At no point in any of these transitions did anyone call the new version a “substitute” for the previous one.

The Argentine veal milanesa is not a substitute for the Italian veal cotoletta. It is the Argentine version of the dish. The chicken milanesa is not a substitute for the veal milanesa. It is the chicken milanesa. The napolitana is not a substitute for the plain version. It is the napolitana. Every transition was a real culinary act — the dish adapting to a new place, a new ingredient, a new context — and the people making the food understood that. The thing on the plate was the dish. The thing on the plate was not a stand-in for some original.

Then, somewhere around the 2010s, the framing changed. When I started making milanesas with chickpeas in my own kitchen, around 2018, the rest of the food world had begun describing every plant version of every dish as a substitute for the animal version. The cookbooks did it. The bloggers did it. The restaurants did it. The packaging did it. Suddenly, my milanesa — which was the milanesa, made with what was in the pantry, breaded the same way, fried the same way, served with the same lemon and the same Malbec — was being framed as a substitute for veal.

It is not. It has never been. The chickpea is not standing in for the veal. The chickpea is the milanesa. The dish is built on chickpea logic — the coarse-pulse texture, the potato as binder, the aquafaba as the wash — and the result is its own thing. It does not taste like veal. It does not pretend to taste like veal. It does not need to taste like veal. It is a milanesa. The shattering crust is the dish. The lemon-squeeze moment is the dish. The bone-dry red is the dish. The chickpea is the protein the dish is built around now, the way the chicken was the protein the dish was built around in the 1950s, the way the veal was the protein the dish was built around in 1880. The dish moved. It is the dish.

This is the framing that the word “substitute” makes impossible.

The word “substitute” forces a comparison. It implies an original and a replacement. It implies that the replacement is, by definition, less. It implies that the diner should be holding the food on the plate up against an absent reference dish and grading it on how closely it matches. The word installs, in the diner’s mind, a comparison that the food cannot win — because no version of any dish, made with new ingredients, is ever going to match the version that was made with the old ingredients exactly. That is not a failure of the new version. That is the point of the new version. It is its own thing.

I want to make this argument with two case studies from the imitation-meat world, because the case studies are public, the data is public, and the contrast is sharp.

Beyond Meat launched the Beyond Burger in 2016, with marketing that leaned hard on the substitute framing. The pitch — verifiable in their early ad campaigns and corporate communications — was that the Beyond Burger was a plant-based product that tasted just like beef. The marketing literally compared it to ground beef. The packaging used a red-and-white color scheme that mimicked beef packaging. The grocery store placement was, in many chains, alongside the meat case. The framing was: this is a substitute for ground beef. This is for people who love beef but want to eat less of it.

The product had a moment. Sales spiked. Then sales dropped. By 2024, Beyond Meat’s stock had fallen by more than ninety percent from its 2019 peak. There were many reasons for the decline — pricing, supply chain, competition — but the deepest one, in my read, is the framing. The product positioned itself as a substitute for beef. Every bite was, in the diner’s mind, a comparison to beef. And every bite, by the inescapable logic of comparison, was the version that wasn’t quite beef. The product could never win. The framing had foreclosed the win.

Compare this to Impossible Foods’ Impossible Sausage, launched in 2020. The framing was slightly different. The sausage was positioned not as a substitute for pork but as a sausage. The marketing leaned into the format — breakfast sandwiches, pasta dishes, pizza toppings — rather than into the comparison. The packaging was more product-confident, less defensive. The placement was often in the breakfast aisle rather than the meat case. And, by accounts from the food press through 2022 and 2023, the product fared meaningfully better in consumer acceptance and repeat purchase than the substitute-framed competitors. Not perfectly. The category is hard. But better.

The lesson is not about meat substitutes versus meat substitutes. The lesson is about the framing. A product positioned as “this is the new version of the dish” can win the diner’s attention. A product positioned as “this is a substitute for the old version of the dish” cannot, because the framing has already conceded the competition. The substitute-framed product is, in the diner’s mind, the lesser version. It is the version you eat when you can’t have the real thing. It is the version you settle for.

Nobody, in the history of cooking, has wanted to settle.

This is what is broken about the substitute word. It tells the diner, before the bite, that they are settling. And the food that follows, no matter how good, has to spend its entire performance climbing back out of that hole. Most of the time, it cannot. Most of the time, the framing wins and the food loses, and the diner walks away with the impression that plant-cooking is, as a category, a thing you settle for. Which is the exact opposite of what is true.

The fix is to drop the word.

A chickpea milanesa is a milanesa. A mushroom Wellington is a Wellington. A lentil moussaka is a moussaka. A cashew-aioli is an aioli. A miso-darkened mushroom broth is a stock. None of these are substitutes. Each of these is a dish, made with what is in the kitchen, by a cook who knows what they are doing, with technique that is older than any of us and works without modification on plants.

I am not saying the word “substitute” should be banned. There are contexts where it is technically correct — a chemistry-lab context, a pharmacology context, a one-to-one swap in a recipe (“you can substitute lemon for vinegar”). The word does honest work in those contexts. The word does dishonest work on a plate.

The next time you are about to describe a dish you made — to a friend, to a guest, to a stranger at a dinner table — and you feel the urge to say “this is a vegan substitute for X,” try the following experiment. Stop. Say what the dish is. “This is a milanesa.” “This is a moussaka.” “This is a Wellington.” Let the diner take a bite. Let them ask the question themselves if they want to. Let the food answer the question on its own terms.

You will be surprised how often the question never comes up. The food does not need defending. The food was always strong enough on its own. The word was the thing making it small.

The chickpea is not a substitute for the veal. The chickpea is the milanesa. Drop the word and the dish gets to be itself.

— Alexandre Teulade Washington, D.C.