Food thoughts
“It isn’t easy being green.” Really, it isn’t.
While I’m not a tried and true vegan, I love the benefits a plant-based, low-dairy diet has for health, and I often make vegan choices.
Veganism is quite often a step that comes after vegetarianism. It seems easy- you’ve already cut out meat products, how hard would it be to cut out eggs & dairy?
Well, even if you’re someone who thinks that’s simple, it’s not as easy as it sounds. I told you Kermit knew what he was talking about.
Can you identify these common ingredients and where they come from?
Cochineal extract
Aspic
Confectioner’s glaze
Stearic acid
Chymotrypsin
You guessed it: all animal products.
Cochineal extract is a red dye made from crushed cochineal insect carcasses. It’s also called carminic acid, carmine, and natural red 4A.
Besides being something that Julia Childs has mastered, aspic is jelly made from meat or fish.
Confectioner’s glaze is not simply a sugary concoction- it’s a type of “food shellac” that comes from an insect.
Stearic acid is a fatty acid that comes from animal fat (tallow).
Last but not least, chymotrypsin is an enzyme extracted from ox pancreases.
What about things you can’t read labels on?
McDonald’s has revealed it uses animal products to cook their fries
Wine & beer can be made with animal based “clarifiers”.
Sugar is processed with bone char to remove the color.
Chewing gum can contain multiple sources of animal ingredients, like glycerol & lanolin.
Insulin- yup, the insulin used by diabetics comes from hogs.
I’ll stop now, but the list goes on forever. Here are some more non-vegan ingredients that tend to pose as veggie friendly (things like butter, caramel, and soy cheese).
Whether you’re vegan, vegetarian, or not- it’s good to know what’s in our food.
What ingredients have surprised you? If your vegan or vegetarian, do you read food labels? What do you do if you don’t know what an ingredient is? What do you do at restaurants?
Dinner, Uncategorized
Tonight’s dinner got me thinking. It was nothing new- just some reheated vegan eggplant parm rescued from the freezer. (The last of it actually- I need to make more asap!)
But here I go and write this post about decreasing my dairy intake, and then don’t really mention it again.
That’s mostly because I haven’t entirely wrapped my head around it, but I promise I’ll start sharing some more- like the books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, etc that have made me readjust my thinking.
Either way, ever since I wrote that post, I have been eating significantly less milk, cheese, and eggs: no cow’s milk in my coffee, no cottage cheese in my oatmeal.
I’m not willing to say “I’m going vegan” mostly because I’m not- I’m still open to eating something with egg in the ingredients (cupcakes, anyone?!) or when the situation is entirely out of my control & I’d rather not offend anyone (aka the inlaws). And I’m still eating fish on occasion.
Now that I haven’t been eating those things directly, I’ve been paying attention to what’s on the package as well. Maybe not in every situation, but at least in the learning process.
So the words milk, egg, and cheese are obvious. But what about all those super long words?
I decided to crack open an old dusty textbook and discover some sneaky synonyms:
Dairy
Caramel candy, carob candies, casein and caseinates, custard, curds,
lactalbumin, goats milk, milk chocolate, nougat, protein hydrolysate,
semisweet chocolate, yogurt, pudding, whey, butter, lactose, cream, some “natural” flavorings.
Egg
Albumin, apovitellin, avidin, béarnaise sauce, eggnog, egg whites,
flavoprotein, globulin, hollandaise sauce, imitation egg products, livetin,
lysozyme, mayonnaise, meringe, ovalbuman, ovogycoprotin, ovomucin,
ovomucoid, ovomuxoid, simplesse.
Other
There’s also plenty of things that seem vegan, but technically aren’t.
-Some brands of soy cheese or soy yogurt (contain casein, which is dairy)
-Soup or grains cooked with chicken or beef broth
-Lard (tortillas, refried beans)
-Veggies made with meat for flavoring (collard greens cooked with pork)
-Beer/wine (animal products are sometimes used in processing)
-Honey
-Gelatin
-Food colorings (I wrote a paper in school about cochineal/carmine- red food color made of crushed insects- aaccck)
-Sugar (sometimes processed with animal bone)
Have any to add to the list?
