First came the artisanal cheeses, followed by artisanal chocolate. Now there's a Seattle-based company called Field Roast making what you might call artisanal fake meat. But don't call it that within earshot of Field Roast's founder, David Lee.

“I'm not making fake meat,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “Being fake anything implies being lesser. I sell grain meat.”

Lee, a Buddhist, became a vegetarian at an early age, after writing a school report on foie gras and being repelled by the force feeding of geese. He went on to become a chef at various hotels and restaurants in California and Seattle, but was more interested in figuring out how to feed poor people, who really appreciate the value of a meal, than “cooking for rich people”, for whom Lee felt food was more a form of entertainment than a matter of sustenance.

Lee's idealism inspired him to launch a company called Common Meals, which taught homeless people in shelters how to cook. In 1992, the company was sold to a non-profit and renamed FareStart.

In 1997, Lee decided to try his hand at producing high quality meat substitutes, and founded Field Roast. The Pacific Northwest is fertile ground for vegan ventures; Tofurkey is based in nearby Oregon, and Yves Veggie Cuisine is just north of the border in Vancouver. What is it about the climate that's so conducive to cultivating fake meat?

I hadn't heard of Field Roast until their line of grain meat sausages started to turn up in the stores recently. The sausages, which are a blend of grains, vegetables and legumes, come in three flavors: Italian, made with eggplant, fennel, garlic, and red pepper; Smoked Apple Sage, with Yukon gold potatoes, apples and “rubbed” sage; and Mexican Chipotle, containing not just chipotle peppers but chili de arbol peppers as well (no, I hadn't heard of them, either. Apparently, they're very hot).

So, how do Field Roast sausages rate? I tried all three, and while I give them high marks for flavor, I have to add that they're also high-priced, at nearly $6 for a pack of four, and they're high-fat, too, with each sausage containing 12 grams of fat.

And because the sausages have a tendency to crumble, each sausage is contained in a plastic “casing” which, I might add, is rather a pain to remove.

Having said that, though, I have to admit that the Mexican Chipotle sausage was delicious crumbled up in a corn tortilla with Hawthorne Valley’s excellent jalapeno sauerkraut and a bit of cheddar, and the Italian sausage was tasty on a pita pizza. The Smoked Apple Sage sausage makes a good breakfast sausage, too.

Are they good enough to make me give up my favorite veggie sausages? Not quite. I'll stick with low-fat, low-priced LightLife Gimme Lean and Yves veggie links. But I might buy the Field Roast sausages on occasion, when I feel like splurging, and wrangling with the plastic casing.