Dear vegan 2, that is true for everything.
“This frustration of reading the tabloid press… it would easy to become convinced that the human race is on a mission to divide things into two clean columns… Good or evil, healthy or deadly or natural or chemical… Everything organic and natural is good, ignoring the fact that organic natural substances include arsenic and poo and crocodiles. And everything chemical is bad, ignoring the fact that… everything is chemicals. Everything is chemicals! The day they discover yoga mats are carcinogenic will be the happiest day of my life.”
— Tim Minchin
All kinds of weird shit you’d think would be vegan aren’t… like some brands of white sugar (bone char) and some beers (isinglass [fish swim bladders]). And there’s always our good friend with a million names, cochineal/carmine/crimson lake/natural red 4/E120, aka bugs that make your food red.
They sneak gelatin into so many things too. One that got me for a year or two after I went vegetarian was Altoids. I liked to keep em in my car to have something to munch/occupy myself while driving, and never even thought to check the ingredients. How could mints have animal in em? Turns out they have gelatin! I honestly never miss meat or anything, but I do miss gelatin to a degree. Not because I want gelatin in particular, but it’s in so many tasty things, and vegetarian gummies and the like are always so expensive ;_;
Also milk powder and whey - there’s so many god damn chips where you go “why the fuck does that need milk powder?”
The real answer to that question is the dairy industry. Same reason there’s high fructose corn syrup in so many random things - corn industry.
Yup it costs food processors next to nothing due to the subsidized overproduction.
Dammit I shouldn’t be subscribed to Belle Delphine then I guess.
At least it has the juice, I suppose
And tbf, I can’t imagine a more beautiful thing
i was about to recommend katyes, because they are great and cost like 1€ a bag in local stores, but apparently, thats 5€ on amazon (fuck amazon), so unless u can get them locally, thats not exactly a good option :<
Yeah, I’ve had (many of…) them while overseas and they’re probably some of my favorite veggie gummies, but sadly quite expensive back here in the states. They’re a precious part of my luggage returning ahaha, maybe not entirely a bad thing I can’t get them quite that cheap here… that and freia chocolate
Not to say your wrong, but I personally don’t understand this strict adherence to pretty arbitrary rules. I agree with the idea of vegan/vegetarian, as a way to protest animal mistreatment and the increased resources animals consume. However, that amount of gelatin is not playing a factor in that. It’s also not hurting you at all. I’m curious what makes you be so strict?
I can’t speak for them, but:
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I found gelatin kind of disgusting even before going vegetarian, and many vegetarians, including past me, grow more disgusted after they become vegetarian. You typically also inform yourself more and learn of various foods with gelatin, where you might’ve found the thought disgusting even beforehand.
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I can empathize with your point that these mints contain so little gelatin that it hardly matters, since they really do contain very little gelatin. But vegetarianism often follows shortly after you decide that “my impact doesn’t matter” isn’t a valid argument for not doing your best anyways, as that’s also typically the excuse for still eating meat for as long as you did, when you had already decided that it’s immoral.
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It’s often easier to not eat something at all than to make exceptions, because you have to inform yourself on the impact for the latter. This may be an impossible task, because you will find hardly any information for the concrete supply chain of the product you’re looking at.
For example, I would be morally a-ok with eating gelatin, if it came from the bones of cows that died of natural causes. Cows dying of natural causes is practically not a thing, but leaving that aside, I’d need to know the gelatin suppliers and their bone suppliers and would need independent audits of them to have even a chance of knowing the impact. Compare that to just looking for a greenVon the packaging or quickly scanning the ingredient list. I may be a moral Goody Two-Shoes, but I’m also lazy.
I realized I forgot to reply here, but you covered it all pretty thoroughly! I don’t find it appetizing anymore, though I do miss the texture of gummies and still hope to find something closer to it than pectin, but trying to jump through all the mental hoops to justify it etc just ain’t worth it. I draw a pretty simple line at whether an animal dies for something or not, and that works well for me. It isn’t particularly difficult to find alternatives to stuff like altoids either, though I will say I like their classier metal tin ahaha. But I just gave them away and bought something else, easy peasy
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Damn, I didn’t know about the sugar and beer. Guess i gotta look up what I’m drinking
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Thanks :)
I’ll just stick to limiting my meat intake.
tell me one food that isn’t made of chemicals
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Imaginary corn.
Is the Glow Cloud vegan?
Is sunlight considered plant food? Also there are fungi that feed on ionizing radiation.
Sugar? It’s made of chemical.
Sunlight
You have a point.
From my understanding the only way to get sunlight into your body as nourishment is via the butthole.
That’s what I’ve heard anyways.
I’m confused. I thought veganism was about animal welfare, what does it have to do with food being made out of chemicals?
it is but it’s also hitched to “crunchy” culture, which has some weird braindead threads running through it about body purity and “nature = good”.
Oreos are technically vegan. You’re welcome.
As are potatoes. Even if you quarter them, spray them with oil, add a few seasons, and air fry them for 15 minutes. Still vegan.
Also Nutter Butters and Marizpan Ritter Sport.
Why the “technically” qualifier. They’re positively vegan!
They put chemicals in everything now. I heard they even put dihydrogen monoxide in the water!
“Chemical” is now used with the meaning of “ultra-processed ingredient with either unknown origin or unknow effect on your body”. It is not the first meaning of the term but I guess it is a meaning now and we have to deal with it.
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Me, crushing up blood-cruelty cocaine in a tiny one-cent plastic baggie: “I really hope this baggie doesn’t have PFAS in it…”
A better question is “is this ultra processed”
Like, is this a product comprised mostly highly refined and modified ingredients? And thus is it likely to have had important nutritional components removed?
In all likelihood, none of the actual ingredients are actively bad for you in moderation, but, it’ll be nutritionally lacking.
I live with two junkfood vegans and oh my god dude. I’m literally broke and eating from food banks and my diet is less bad than theirs.
Junk vegans are truly majestic creatures
You always gotta check the chemicals to make sure they didn’t sneak dairy in for some reason.
Okay, look. Atoms, in all their wonder make up pretty much everything known to exist in the universe. Chemistry, the science of chemicals, is just taking that understanding we have of atoms and applying it to how the atoms interact based on what atoms are there, their charges, bonds, etc.
Thus unless it’s on the periodic table, where it would be an element, then it’s a chemical.
Even assuming that instead of “chemicals”, people mean synthetic chemicals… To that I say… Who cares?
Synthetic chemicals come in two forms: a synthesized version of a chemical that is naturally occurring, where synthesis is a more commercially viable way to obtain that chemical, or a chemical that isn’t found naturally, which undergoes significant scrutiny before anyone is allowed to put it in your food and sell it to you.
We generally give “natural” chemicals less scrutiny than synthetic chemicals. And I’ll remind everyone that cyanide is a naturally occurring chemical. Though it’s natural, we don’t general add that to our food. Some food contains cyanide naturally, like cherry pits, but that’s usually a part we don’t eat.
The WHO has a whole article about toxins in food… https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/natural-toxins-in-food
So yeah, it might be made of synthetic chemicals, which have been researched, scrutinized, and peer reviewed before being approved for consumption and being put in my food. I can’t say the same for literally anything “natural”. We just ate that shit and if you died from eating a thing, nobody else ate that thing. And that was the way of things before modern science and chemicals…
So fuck you, and the horse you rode in on.
As someone wholly uneducated on these kinds of things, I just choose to use the heuristic of defaulting to using/ingesting natural substances, as much as practical, because we evolved with them and it would seem more likely our bodies (and the ecosystem) know how to deal with them. I also don’t trust the government to be discerning/uncorruptible enough to not allow stuff to pass that shouldn’t, especially now. Peer review is more trustworthy though, and gets more trustworthy the longer something has been around and studied more.
You can’t feed that to your cat. It’s vegan chemicals
