Bubble Tea

I'm a sucker for bubble tea (no pun intended!); I don't get around it often, but when I do it's a food orgy. So I looked it up, to see whether it's veg*n.

1. Tapioca pearls (bubbles) are vegan: made from starch.

2. The drink itself may or may not contain dairy ingredients. It is pretty clear that the milk tea is not vegan, although sometimes a non-dairy creamer can be used (still not necessarily vegan). More confusing when it is just tea or fruit juice, since sometimes they are made from mixes and you pretty much never know whats in them.

3. Jellies that are used instead of/along with tapioca appear to be vegan, at least I came across no information on their unveg*ness. No mentions of gelatin either.

Lactic acid (lactate)

Once again, I stand corrected: The Vegan Society has a list of potentially non-vegan ingredients. Their website also has a lot of other useful resources. 

Keep in mind the word "potential:" a lot of these ingredients can come from both animal and non-animal sources. For example, lactic acid (lactate) is listed as derived form milk, whether other sources claim is is most often vegan:

Quote:

"If it's lactate or lactic acid, it's not from dairy (exception - sterol lactate due to the stearic acid). "Lac" ingredients are usually produced by a fermentation process using cornstarch or beet sugar. Lactose is always from dairy."

Source: http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/faqingredients.htm#lac

Wikipedia article says that although it can be produced from lactose, it usually comes from bacterial culture.

Cholesterol

Another thing that I never thought about, but discovered while researching the flavor question is that vegan food cannot have any cholesterol in it; cholesterol is present only in animal-based foods. This means that both the list of the ingredients and the nutritional information can be used to determine whether the product is vegan or not. It would be a good idea to examine both, because it appears that some products marketed as vegan are actually not (only heard rumors, but better safe than sorry).

Some plant food can stimulate the production of cholesterol by human body, but will not contain cholesterol itself.

Source:

http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=12647.0

Artificial and natural flavoring

There is something that puzzled me for a while; what is artificial chicken/meat flavor?

Artificial flavors can contain natural ingredients that underwent certain chemical treatment, or contain part natural, part lab-synthesised ingredients. Bottom line: artificial OR natural flavor can be almost anything.

Source: 

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3289/is_n11_v166/ai_20224156

This article is also great because it dicusses the use of "natural flavor" as a catch phrase; people tend to associate it with healthy food, while in most cases there is no difference, and sometimes artificial flavors can even be safer, and almost always - cheaper.

Also, in the first post I complained that there is no complete list of ingredients with descriptions; well, there is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_number

Next time instead of Googling frantically, can check that first.

Vitamin D3

Vitamin D3 is found (not exclusively) in margarine. It is of animal origin, from sheep (wool, according to wikipedia) or from fish according to vrg.org.

Quote:

"What is the difference between vitamin D2 and D3?

D-2 (ergocalciferol) is derived from yeast, while D-3 (cholecalciferol) is derived from lanolin (from sheep) or fish. D-2 and D-3 are both used to fortify milk and other dairy products. Some D-3 vitamin supplements are made with fish oil."

Source:

http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/faqingredients.htm#d3

This one is a big shame of mine, since I didn't know of its unsafe-ness untill only recently; I found it out completely by accident, while looking for a recipe. Now I make sure that I know what all the ingredients on the list mean before I buy something. This self-embarassment is part of the inspiration for this blog - the more these "boobie-traps" will be talked about, the higher the chances of people coming across the right information before they make a mistake. In any case - better late than never!

Rennet

Rennet is used in cheese production to help the coagulation of milk. It is produced from the stomacks of calves. There are many kinds of cheese that use microbial enzymes (vegetarian-friendly) instead of rennet, since the former are cheaper; rennet is most often found in tranditional European cheese.

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennet

Welcome, young Vegenauts!

After being vegetarian for over 3 years and vegan for about 2, I still feel a bit cheated every time I read a label on a seemingly veg*n-friendly product (most often food), and find that it is not as safe as it looked from afar. The problem that I still encounter once in a while is that sometimes when standing among shelves and holding an obscure package I have no clue what certain ingredients are. They are written out very clearly, no blame on the manufacturer; only I didn't know that I had to look up monoglycerides, vitamine D and PVC before leaving the house. No excuses for ignorance, but right there, with no access to the universal sources of knowledge such as wikipedia, it is rather frustrating to try to figure out what is toxic, what is of animal origin, what is edible but undesirable and what is actually good.

Although once you've got the ingredient list at hands' reach, and you look up the items one by one, the information is almost always readily available. However, what I haven't seen yet is some kind of alert list of the "unsafe" substances that commonly appear in products that otherwise would be veg*n-friendly. So far the closest I've seen were the lists of brands, with descriptions and classifications of products.

In this blog I want to share some of my veg experiments, discoveries and disapointments, as well as dedmystify some terms that seem to appear fairly often on veg*n sites, but are rarely explained; so here's another attempt at no-nonsense guide to being veg*n in a non-veg*n society for the new (and not so new) veg*ns out there!

Stay tuned for updates, and feel free to send me your own stories and experiences that you would like to share.