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.