The burger was stacked with American cheese, pickle medallions, and crispy fried onions (a texture win), and embodied all that I love about a quintessential Shake Shack burger-sans beef. The patty was sandwiched between Shack Shack’s signature pillowy potato roll and slathered with Shack Sauce (a combo of pickle brine, mayo, ketchup, and mustard). I could distinguish the crunch of a carrot from the chew of a mushroom. On first bite, I was pleasantly surprised at the apparent presence of actual vegetables-a rarity! It was flavorful and juicy, and full of discrete chunks of the aforementioned veggies, rather than an all-too-common mash of them.

I had all of this in mind when I tasted Shake Shack’s addition to the veggie burger canon earlier this week. :'(William Young, The Shack, Windblown Media, 2007, Pg 182)': 'The esoteric spiritual traditions - whether Christian mystics, Hebrew Kabbalists, Zen Buddhists, Islamic Sufis, or Hindu yogis - all have specific practices to help individuals overcome this great 'illusion of separation' and to experience the One True Self. These chains have moved away from the idea that a veggie burger should contain actual veggies, and most of their forays into vegetarianism have flopped. In the past few years, fast food chains like Burger King and KFC have bet big on products like burgers and nuggets that approximate the taste and texture of meat as closely as possible. The current landscape of meatless fast food burgers is, to put it plainly, pretty bleak. As a fan of both vegetables and burgers, I decided to give it a try.

The burger, already available nationally through app-ordering, and slated for an in-store rollout May 5, is filled with mushrooms, sweet potatoes, carrots, farro, and quinoa. But Shake Shack’s latest offering, the “ Veggie Shack,” doesn’t try to disguise its contents as anything other than good ol’ fashioned vegetables. The truth is that most meatless fast food burgers taste like they’re ashamed to be plant-based, instead celebrating their similarities to real beef.

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