Review: Prime Roots Deli Meat, And Also The Experience Of Influencing

Sponcon!

When you are a blogging microcelebrity, you get spammed with emails from PR companies who are generously offering to let you publish blog posts with titles like Six Best Cities To Get It On, or How Rising Tariffs Will Affect Animal Shelters, or Please Please Please Buy My Hair-Care Product Or My Twelve Adorable Small Children Will Starve. I used to delete all of them.

But then one day I got an email that had FREE in the title. As someone who has been a professional writer for over a decade, FREE is my favorite word, because I can’t afford to buy anything. So I clicked.

It turns out that not all of those emails are spammy pitches for guest blog posts? Sometimes the PR companies want to give you free shit?

Specifically, Prime Roots wanted to give me vegan deli meat.

I considered my ethics, my duty to my readers, the importance of making sure all my writing is the high-quality soon-to-be-automated-by-ChatGPT book reviews you have come to expect from Thing of Things.

And then I decided all of that was bullshit and sold out. Sponcon, here I come!

A few days later, I got a huge box from Prime Roots, probably three feet on each side. Visions of unimaginable vegan-deli-meat wealth danced in my mind. I eagerly anticipated eating vegan salami for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I imagined the grand potlatch I would throw. “Eat! Eat!” I would say, to my dozens of dinner guests. “See what bounty I have provided for you with my writing skill! Behold the charcuterie boards spread before you, rich with both vegan ham and vegan turkey, and also with almonds and jams and crackers and the most expensive cheeses the Berkeley Bowl carries!”

…did you know that companies that give influencers free stuff to review don’t just give them the stuff?

I got one package each of vegan ham, vegan turkey, and vegan salami, but that wasn’t all. I got a freezer bag! I got a tiny useless cutting board the size of my hand! I got a hat!

My friends suggested that Prime Roots did this in order to bribe me to give them a good review. I think that’s stupid, because I would have been way more likely to give them a good review if they’d given me enough meat I could have put on a vegan-charcuterie potlatch. I observe that all the swag has PRIME ROOTS on it prominently. So I think that Prime Roots intended for me to take #aesthetic photos of myself cutting vegetables on their cutting board, with the Prime Roots logo under the artfully arranged avocado slices, and then post the picture on my Instagram that I don’t have.

This is my coparent Lindsey in his fashionable vegan influencer baseball cap. We are extremely glamorous people with a well-organized household that has never subscribed to too many cleaning products on Amazon and wound up with The Great Wall of Dish Soap on top of the dishwasher.

So. How was the deli meat?

My entire household is vegan or lacto vegetarian, which gives us some weaknesses in reviewing meat alternatives. I went pescetarian when I was three years old and found out that meat came from animals, so I have no experience eating meat and don’t like it. I stole some bacon off a friend’s plate once to see what all the fuss was about and that stuff is gross, I don’t understand how any of you can bear to eat it. I thought Impossible meat was really weird-tasting the first couple of times I had it, but I continued to eat it dutifully to increase their market share and it’s gradually grown on me.

I was going to give some of the vegan meat to my friend Misha, who eats meat, but then I forgot and it was kind of going bad so I ate it anyway. If they’d given me enough for a potlatch we wouldn’t have these problems.

With these caveats: Prime Roots meat was fine.

My seven-year-old Vasili tried the salami, announced “that’s spicy! It hurt my mouth!”, and refused to try any of the others. However, that’s basically how Vasili responds to any food other than cereal, milk, mac and cheese, and carrot sticks, so I wouldn’t hold it against Prime Roots.

My husband Topher said that the Prime Roots meat was “good.” But he has very little self-control around food. Whenever I make bread or cookies, they disappear within twelve hours.¹ And yet the Prime Roots deli meat managed to stay in the refrigerator for long enough that I was concerned it would go bad. So he gave it a bad review by revealed preference.

I ate the meat by itself, so that I wouldn’t be distracted by the taste of the lettuce or the mayo or the bread. The turkey and ham were both oddly bland, which I understand is a problem that animal turkey and ham also have. The salami was pretty good but I have not felt myself driven to buy it again. I like Tofurky better.

My coparent Lindsey said that my deli-meat choices were deranged. He ate it in a sandwich and said that Prime Roots was much better than Tofurky. He also expressed disbelief that I eat Tofurky turkey on purpose and wasn’t putting it on the grocery list as some elaborate scheme to keep Topher from eating up my sandwich meat. He says that Prime Root deli meat tastes good and he would buy it again if he knew how to make sandwiches that weren’t PB&J.

I don’t mean this review to trash Prime Roots. It tastes fine. Probably if you like deli meat you should try it out and see if you like it. They did give me a nifty little freezer bag, and my kid takes it to school when they’ve left their lunchbox at school, and we should consider this as a point in its favor.

Uh. I mean. Prime Roots is great. Everyone should buy Prime Roots! I am a good influencer. I am shilling your product. Please give me more free shit.

Since I realized that some of the emails have free stuff, I’ve been opening them, but the only free other stuff I’ve been offered is vegan omega-3 pills that supposedly have anti-aging properties. I decided not to ask for them, because I can’t figure out what about my review could possibly inform your decision to take them. It’s not like I’m going to take them every day for twenty years and then post a picture to show you how old I look. It’s just going to be like: “This omega-3 pill tastes unobjectionable, like all other omega-3 pills. While I have not personally inspected the supply chain, I have no particular reason to believe that they’re lying about it being vegan. Probably it increases your blood level of omega-3s, like all other omega-3 pills. If you read some papers, having more omega-3s is good for you, and if you read other papers, it doesn’t matter very much. You can choose this pill brand over others for various reasons, for example if it has a lower price, or if it is conveniently located on the shelf, or if you like the way the bottle looks.”

I am never going to make it as an influencer.

1. Sixteen, if it’s overnight.