Faux Substitutes Are No Substitute

I was recently invited to salon.com to take part in a tasting of "faux-carb" products--packaged and mix-and-serve foods that use carbohydrate substitutes, mainly soy. These items, meant to resemble various starchy foods such as mashed potatoes, noodles, and chips, tasted universally bad.

New York Times writer Mark Bittman, author of "The Minimalist" columns and cookbooks, offered the following assessment:

What are we saying? It's not going to make you puke? That's our highest praise: If it's four in the afternoon and you haven't had anything to eat all day and you're plotzing, you would eat this!

"Faux-carb taste test" [salon.com]