I will be the first to admit that, in a standard vegetarian diet, very few things come close to the satisfaction you get from a tenderloin steak, seared to perfection, topped with a medallion of herbed butter or perhaps a drizzle of red wine jus. But a fascinating new plant-based meat alternative might just be the substitute we’ve been waiting for.
I’m talking about hell fruit—the entirely new fruit Dr Patricia Lyons recently discovered growing on a cursed, gnarled tree that stands at the intersection of two long, deserted roads which appear to stretch on unendingly in all directions. Says Lyons, “This new fruit looks and smells like a pink grapefruit from the outside— but when you cut it open, the inside is a mass of bleeding flesh!”
When Lyons and her team took a few samples back to their lab, they found its makeup was somewhere between human meat and goat meat. They tried cooking with it and found that, while there was a distinct aroma of burning hair and brimstone when it first hits the pan, the end result was juicy, delicious and identical to real meat. “This is such a great discovery. For decades the food science industry and the farming industry have been trying to find new, sustainable ways to produce meat for general consumption. This might just be the answer.”
Hell fruit are naturally seedless, so Lyons and her team needed to graft a branch from the original tree to a lemon tree to propagate this exciting new fruit. “It does work, technically,” she explains. “We found that the graft took really well; the only issue was that the lemons being produced by the stock tree were full of blood and not lemon juice.”
So far, it seems there’s only one catch: eating the hell fruit causes the unmistakable insignia of Baphomet to appear on the eater’s forehead. Lyons pushes aside her fringe to give us a better look. “Not everyone gets it, though,” she laughs. “Marty, one of my research students, got the sign of Moloch instead!”