Response to comments

Well, if we want to talk about "yuck" factor, many foods out there would beat out fake meat (starting with factory-farmed real meat, and ending with, say, cheese puffs or even veggie puffs for that matter). I think fake meat can have the same range of processing, additives, etc.

Remember how, over the holidays, mom harped on how she never should have driven me to "that conference"? What I might have told her was, had I not decided to become a vegetarian then, I'd have come across plenty of other other inspiration along the way. Check out Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation," which is as much about the food supply in general as it is about fast food, or Michael Pollan's "Power Steer" and tell me that real meat is less gross than fake. A friend/coworker of mine who was recently staffed to an animal antibiotics job said she didn't want to do it because she was afraid of what she'd learn; she liked meat and wanted to keep eating it. Which is her call. But if we're going to talk about food being 'yuck,' you've got to consider what's in your meat.

See also (and again) the Grist column on how factory farmed salmon really is gross.

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Back to the topic of binders: I think tofu has its place. It's not something I want to eat every day, but I quite like it (and I'm not afraid of soy--of which, by the way, you get much more through eating soy-fed meat than you do by consuming actual soy products). I'm serving edemame as a snack, and the ice cream is soy based (but really, how much ice cream are people going to have). I'm just going to put maybe a tablespoon of tofu/olive oil/herb in each endive to hold everything together.