The Vegan Thread

These are great too, super easy and tasty. Think I'm gonna try and make a tray flapjack style next time. https://plantyou.com/breakfast-cookie-recipe/

Ta for linking that I've been meaning to try that for ages. Any tips alterations you did on the Recipie??
my vegan ways have slipped I guess I'm one of them school night vegans atm. But the adventure in to vegan eating has opened my eyes to changing my diet and looking at what I consume.

Question for a newbie vegan here. There’s some items in supermarket bakeries like plain white rolls and baguettes that are labelled vegetarian but not vegan. There’s no milk products in the ingredients, so I can only assume it contains trace elements of whey or milk.
What’s the dig with this sort of stuff? Is it only labelled non vegan because it can’t officially be certified vegan with such traces, but they’re unofficially vegan and nearly all vegans still just eat them?
I have bought plain baguettes thinking they were just white bread so must be vegan. Have I been sinning?

I normally just go by the ingredients for most things. If it doesn't explicitly state that it's vegan but the ingredients are all fine it's usually because there's a risk of cross contamination in the facility that the item was produced. If you're vegan by choice rather than being intolerant to certain animal products, I wouldn't worry about it.
The main exception that comes to mind is beer or wine. The finished product may not contain animal products so won't list them in the ingredients but the production process involves animal products. Best to Google if they're not marked as vegan and you're not sure!

Once you've been at it for a while it gets a lot easier, you can walk in to a shop and know exactly what you should and shouldn't buy rather than having to read every individual label!

Cool, thanks for that. I don’t drink so that’s one less thing to worry about. It says a lot about how my diet was already that I didn’t actually need to change an awful lot to go vegan. More just tweaks. I was veggie already, cook from scratch everyday and don’t eat shit.

So say the item below. It’s marked as not vegan, but would most vegans still eat this? It’s just plain white bread, surely?

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I’d want to read the list of ingredients- bit weird that it specifically says not suitable for vegans but maybe that’s just how Lidl does it

The allergens say it might contain traces of milk, its probably made on the same production line/oven/trays as other baked goods containing butter or milk

Well some of the frozen fruit and veg in Morrisons is labelled vegan and some of it labelled vegetarian. I'm not sure what couldn't be vegan in frozen fruit and veg. I think sometime it's just a bit of outdated packaging.

I think a lot of manufacturers are over cautious when it comes to labelling food, similar to stuff labelled ‘not suitable for peanut allergy sufferers’ etc.

As @ltc says, go by the ingredients and make your decision based on that.

Product manufacturers are legally obliged to declare if a product contains any of the 14 main allergens, one of which is milk. So unless it has milk written in bold on the list of ingredients then it doesn’t contain milk (although cross contamination could be a possibility).

You could always email Lidl for clarification?

This as well.

If you imagine how many different departments (procurement, packaging design, etc) have input into a product, it’s easy to see how mistakes can be made. Or they just CBA to update packaging.

Any tips alterations you did on the Recipie?

Only change I made was to use bird-eye chilis rather than jalapenos, as that's just what I had in the house. I only made it the once, keep intending to do so again, but forgetting/being lazy.

I'm pretty sure it's a case of the product being vegan but them not being 100% sure there's no cross-contamination from elsewhere and not being willing to put add to the costs by doing the due diligence to be absolutely sure it's vegan. It's just making sure they don't get sued, like the 'made in a factory that also processes nuts' disclaimer.

That's what I think anyway. I just trust the ingredients list.

I always go on ingredients rather than a specific vegan label. Allergens and "may contain" I just ignore. I'm lactose intolerant but "may contain traces of milk" has not caused an issue yet.. it will catch me out one day haha.

Yeah that’s what I suspected, they can’t officially say it is vegan so they have to say it isn’t.

You'll never progress past level 5 vegan if it's not labelled as strictly vegan, but I eat anything that's not got animals or allogens or animal shit in bold and I've never lost my level 3 card.

barnivore.com is a pretty good resource for checking drinks. It relies on user updates but I've found it to be fairly comprehensive.

Yeah that's pretty much it! How long have you been giving this vegan lark a punt for? How are you finding it?

Only fully vegan for two weeks, but I was veggie before and I was hardly buying much more dairy than a block of a halloumi and a pint of milk a week, so it wasn’t a big deal changing eating habits. And before I’d go days following a vegan diet without even trying to. Seems all vegans take a different path, but I was heading that way for months. Read a few very thought provoking books about it, thought hard about it, and I guess a switch finally clicked to fully commit.
For me it’s as much the environmental side of it - the mess (factory) farming is making of the planet - as it is about animal welfare and the health benefits.

Nice, are you glad you made the switch? This place is a good place to talk to like minded people. It's particularly helpful for restaurant and recipe recommendations but ask anything and I'm sure someone will have a sensible answer!

Got decent Chinese meal from Vegan Planet in Camden today. Probably go to Tofu Vegan first if it was a choice, but wouldn't avoid it.

Didn't know this stuff existed. Will try and report back.

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Im surprised they’re allowed to say “vegan milk” on the packaging considering plant based milks aren’t allowed to use the word milk on their packaging.

Outlaw Horlicks?

Oh. My.

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I could only read part of this, but remind yourself of why meat-eaters who wilfully blind themselves to this shit are scumbags:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/08/theyre-cooking-them-alive-calls-to-ban-cruel-killing-methods-on-us-farms