I saw this question and it got me thinking about a short story I read a while ago (the anthology was an old one pre 1980s). It involved a scientist living somewhere in south America with a deposed dictator and flunkies. They all were really desperate for red meat so the scientist created an artificial tomato that tasted like meat and fed it to them. Plot twist, the tomatoes were injected with snake blood, his research was used to make it so that people who ate the plants turned into some weird slime mold like things.
He had a daughter who he did not let eat the tomatoes as he wanted her spared. The scientist consumed the tomatoes, I think he saw it as a penance for past actions he did for the dictator.