In this neck of the woods, you’ll find far more sandwich lovers than tree huggers and nary a soul who doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. You’ll also find far more flexitarians than you’d ever figure — if you ever figure out of the meaning of the term.

In the 1990s, we began blending the words “flexible” and “vegetarian” to describe those who decide to consume far more plant-based foods than they would on the typical American diet while still consuming meat on occasion. By the 2020s, nearly one in two American adults was eating this way, according to research done by One Poll.

Granted, you wouldn’t figure on 47 percent of adults in this neck of the woods to be eating that way, but I never figured on my brother becoming a borderline flexitarian, either.

When at the pizza shop now, however, he orders a large garden salad and a single slice of plain Neapolitan instead of a large thick-crusted pie topped with sausage and pepperoni that used to serve as that night’s supper and the next day’s lunch. When at a restaurant way back when, my bro would order the biggest steak on the menu and ask for it rare.

Today, it’s rare for him to eat red meat at all, though he still enjoys poultry and especially turkey. Particularly slices of that Thanksgiving staple in a sandwich along with cheese, tomato, and a little mustard.

Which is one of the reasons why I agreed to perform a taste test of Prime Roots’ cold cuts. Along with “clean” deli slices of ham and salami, they offer turkey.

Clean in this case means plant-based instead of meat-based, which means all three varieties would be suitable for vegans, a group that, in this neck of the woods, is almost as rare as Inuits. Which is why this introduction explains the sudden popularity of flexitarianism while mentioning sandwich lovers, tree huggers, Thanksgiving, and my brother.

It’s called covering all the bases, and now that they’ve been covered, let’s clear them. The result of the Prime Roots deli slices’ taste test was, in keeping with the baseball analogy, a bases-loaded home run so well struck it left the stadium.

The original game plan was to have Jimmy make a turkey sandwich the way he normally does. But since younger brothers don’t like being told what to do by older brothers, he made turkey-cheese rollups and ate them as a finger food instead.

When I asked him why, he said, “No bread, no condiments, no hiding the taste.”

So I asked him about the taste. “If you don’t tell a meat-eater what’s really in there [in a sandwich made with Prime Roots turkey],” he answered, “they wouldn’t know the difference.”

Yet there are big differences between making a sandwich with clean, plant-based cold cuts instead of using processed meats. The most important may be one that Prime Roots cites in their advertising.

That the World Health Organization classifies processed meats as a Group 1 Carcinogen. (Some other members of this infamous cancer-causing club include tobacco smoke, radon gas, asbestos, and plutonium.)

Processed meats have been determined to be a carcinogen because of studies like the one published in 2015 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer that associated a 50-gram daily portion of it to an 18 percent increased risk of colon cancer.

While you may not have known about that study, you probably know that ordering a turkey sandwich at the local deli is generally your healthiest option and that ordering a salami sandwich is usually the opposite. Which takes us to my part of the taste test.

Regular readers are aware that I’m the guy who’s been a lacto-ovo vegetarian since day one of college more than 45 years ago. I’m also the guy who ate two ounces slices of Prime Roots’ clean salami inside two healthy-as-can-be sandwiches and thought, “Why didn’t they send me more?”

The clean salami had just the right mix of pepper and spice and had me believing I was eating the real McCoy. Which is even more remarkable because of the major difference between the two in total fat and calories.

Two ounces of real salami contains 212 calories, 160 of which come from fat. Two ounces of the Prime Roots’ salami contains 110 calories, 36 of which are fat.

To help conclude, it would help to clarify why tree huggers, aka staunch environmentalists, were previously mentioned. That’s because, according to a lifestyle impact assessment performed by Boundless Energy, when compared to the amount of water needed to produce conventional meat, the amount needed to produce Prime Roots products is 92 percent less.

Making Prime Roots products instead of conventional meat also creates 89 percent less water eutrophication — the excessive accumulation of nutrients in water bodies that reduces the amount of oxygen in it and can cause fish to perish.

And the reason why Thanksgiving was mentioned? Along with cold cuts, Prime Roots makes a clean turkey shaped just like the bird you baste in the oven on that day.