When you first go vegan (or vegetarian), you spend a little bit of time really looking at labels and figuring out what you can and can't eat. The happy news is that you can find alternatives for pretty much anything thats now off the table, so to speak. Some things are still just kind of funny to find out aren't vegan.
Many of these things are due to gelatin, which is basically ground up animal bones, ligaments and other such happy things of that nature. Yum!
1) Frozen Corn-This was back when I was still just vegeterian, but I bought a bag of frozen green giant butter corn and didn't look at it very carefully. When I got it home, I think I was looking at the ingredients for some other reason and I realized they had gelatin in it. It was pretty frustrating, since I had already bought it, given them economic support, yada yada. Who puts gelatin in frozen corn? (More importantly, why?)
2) Altoid Mints-This was one of those weird things that have gelatin...
3) Poptarts - Gelatin again. For some reason it's in the frosting. You wouldn't think that frosting needs gelatin, but apparently they think it does. By the time I found out that whole foods makes a gelatin free poptart, I was vegan, and they have whey or something.
4) Vegetable soups (like Campbells and Progresso) - Most vegetable soups need to be double checked for animal broths. One would think, vegetable soup = vegetable broth, but not always so. My friend has told me of her bad experience with Campbell's vegetable soup. Apparently they have a vegetable soup with vegetable broth, one with beef broth, and one with beef chunks. She grabbed the one with chunks by mistake and got an unpleasant surprise for lunch. Unfortunately, vegetable soup is the big thing on the label, and everything else is only under ingredients or fine print. This can be a problem in restaurants too, but its up to each veg*n to decide if they want to ask/trust each place they go about the individual broths in the soups. For example, at my work they don't even carry vegetable broth (I work in a retirement home). We don't really get many veg*ns though.
5)McDonald's French Fries - My own personal distaste for Mcdonald's aside (soulless corporation, epitome of the obesity epidemic, Food-that-isn't-really-food, ect), their fries are basically a big pile of lies. In the 90's they told everyone their fries were definitely vegetarian, cooked in 100% vegetable oil. Later it was found out that the recipe for the actual fries includes beef extract. Thats why they had that big lawsuit.
They still use this beef extract, so their fries are not vegetarian. Its hard to find this information, you have to go on their website and look at the ingredients. If you ask the cashier, I'm not sure if they would know or not. Most people assume they are vegetarian. They also don't make it common knowledge that there is milk and wheat in the fries as well, which has implications for milk allergies and celiac's sufferers. They had a few lawsuits about this because some kids got sick (they had celiac's).
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11326937/
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In the '90s, San Diego's Pizza Hut snuck beef into their sauce. The irony there was that the manager was vegetarian....
ReplyDeleteYeah the corn one makes no sense. Are you sure that it's not Poptarts filling that has the gelatin? That seems like it would make more sense for the texture....
Oh, and don't forget most yogurt brands. You have to check for pectin.
thanks very much this has helped alot but i always look at packiging at normally if it says vegitarion i eat it but then you look on the ingredients and it says pork gelatin so i normally dont know what to do plese help me ?
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Yeah, it can be very confusing sometimes. After a while you get used to scanning labels before you buy things. Usually I know which of my favorite things are ok to eat, and for new stuff I scan the labels. Depending on how in depth you go to determine if any sort of animal product is in something, you can get a copy of animal products A-Z. Or, you can cook a lot of your own food because then you know whats in it. Really, you just do the best you can and try to reduce suffering as much as you can. You can search on google for vegetarian groups who will have tips and lists.
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