how vegan is vegan?

[klokkasju]

Hi,

Since it is now November (at least in my country) my 30-days vegan-trial has started. -- And yes, I just wanted to write down this sentence to make it all more settled But we are in the Health&Fitness-Area, so there should be a little bit more topic-related stuff. And there is:

To avoid the obvious non-vegan foods is easy. But (at least in Europe) there are hundreds of ingredients in various foods, which are kind of 'not certainly vegan or non-vegan'. For example different additives which can be made without using animal products, but for which there is also a production method which involves animal products. And - of course - it does not have to be specified on the packing (package? wrapping? - I don't know the right word for this "stuff around things you buy"). Even worse, many of the food producers don't know themselves if they use animal products or not. Especially when they add vitamins to their products, they don't care if those vitamins are gained out of something animal.
In addition some additives don't have to be specified at all. And there are some foods - e.g. soy yoghurt - which start with something animal, grew bacteria on it, produce the yoghurt with them, then there is a complex process I don't fully understand and at the end they "filter out" all the bacteria.

Long story, short question: How do the vegans here find vegan food in "normal" supermarkets? How many levels do you go back in the production process to "test" a product to be vegan? Or do you produce all your food "from scratch"?

In particular I have problems finding such things as margarine, soy yoghurt/milk, rice milk and bread without those "non-certain" additives. So any advice in this direction is gladly accepted.

klokkasju

ps: I know there has definitely been a thread on this before. But the search results for 'vegan' are "contaminated" by all the raw-food threads, so I couldn't find anything useful concerning vegan, but non-raw themes

[appifanie]

most of us vegans won't eat anything unless we can confirm that it is in fact 100% vegan. i googled and found a lot of results on determining veganism of ingredients: vegan ingredients - Google Search

[Rose of Cairo]

The easiest way I found to solve this problem is not to eat any processed foods. When you buy simple things such as fresh fruit and veggies, rice, lentils or potatoes, you don't need to worry about vegan or not vegan. Whole foods are healthier than those processed foods full of all kinds of suspect stuff anyway.

You can also avoid supermarkets and buy your food in wholefood shops (they have products labeled "vegan" and in general less processed foods), marketplaces and fruit & veggie shops. That's what I do too.

Good luck for your trial!

[Fullcrum]

Well, you may think that the other threads being all about raw food being a bad thing...but it's not. For what is raw food?

Uncooked and whole vegan foods. Now you might cook your food, but the "whole" part definitely applies to your situation.

As in, don't buy processed crap. Keep the foods simple in ingredients and you'll never have to worry about vegan/non-vegan. If you're dwelling in the land of Tofurky and fake-food, that's basically the same as all other processed food - only it's vegan. So you can feel ethical about destroying your health. That kinda sucks, doesn't it?

So, no need to worry about if a food contains non-vegan ingredients. Simply abstain from highly processed goods. Stick to foods that have few isolated ingredients, and by that I don't mean abstaining from green powders, which are powdered foods in whole form, but from isolated chemical ingredients.

[klokkasju]

@Rose of Cairo & Fullcrum
Actually I love all those raw-food threads here and I tried to eat raw myself - and failed. I then figured that it might be easier to go step by step. That's why I start with vegan first.
But, yes, you are right ... the crucial point is to minimize the intake of preprocessed food. But concerning rice milk, soy yoghurt and such things - I must admit - I find it hard to abstain from them (at the moment).

@Fullcrum
what are green powders? spices?

@appifanie
Unfortunately where I live there is no such thing as 100% vegan foods, unless you grow everything by yourself. Everything you can buy - even unprocessed foods as vegetables - maybe grown using non-vegan dung etc. ... so you never know.

klokkasju

[Fullcrum]

Are you worried about animal dung being used? Why? That's a natural process that happens in the wild all the time. How could anybody be hurt by using animal dung fertilizer? You might as well pull the earthworms out of the ground - it's torturous eating dirt all day.

In terms of moving step by step, I'd probably rather eat goat's milk yogurt. With rice milk- you can blend your own nut milk and make it taste 1000% times better than anything in the store. It'd be better for you, too. Try blending almonds, walnuts, cashews, pistachios, macadamia nuts, pine nuts, brazil nuts, or tahini. You can get some sprouted raw nut butter from Matt Monarch's website: www.rawveganworld.com

Green powders are a mixture of anywhere from 10-60 different green leafy foods and juices, including algae, wild-crafted plants, herbs, medicinal mushrooms (though not quite green), and eastern and western herbs. Such food mixed and dried into a powder. The best powders always mention that they used no fillers like apple powder or lecithin, and that they dry their ingredients at low temperatures.