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Dear vegan 2, that is true for everything.
Dihydrogen monoxide
Get thee behind me, Satan, I shan’t drink your hellish brew!
That stuff can kill you in minutes
It’s got the highest pH rating of any acid we know of.
Hydrogen hydroxide
Oh god!!!
“This frustration of reading the tabloid press… it would easy to become convinced that the human race is on a mission to divide things into two clean columns… Good or evil, healthy or deadly or natural or chemical… Everything organic and natural is good, ignoring the fact that organic natural substances include arsenic and poo and crocodiles. And everything chemical is bad, ignoring the fact that… everything is chemicals. Everything is chemicals! The day they discover yoga mats are carcinogenic will be the happiest day of my life.”
— Tim Minchin
They put chemicals in everything now. I heard they even put dihydrogen monoxide in the water!
“Chemical” is now used with the meaning of “ultra-processed ingredient with either unknown origin or unknow effect on your body”. It is not the first meaning of the term but I guess it is a meaning now and we have to deal with it.
…in the context of processed foods, i’ve always considered ‘chemicals’ synonymous with industrially synthesised ingredients, by contrast to naturally-occurring foodstuffs…
The problem with that is that it is a completely meaningless distinction. Some of the worst chemicals we often put in our foods are certain kinds of nitrates that are used as preservatives, but those same nitrates occur naturally in celery. If you just eat celery the concentration is low enough to be harmless, but it can be concentrated naturally. If you’ve ever seen celery juice or celery powder on the list of ingredients for a food it is the exact same thing, and just as bad for you.
Naturally occurring isn’t the same as healthy. Most plants are some degree of poisonous. They don’t want to be eaten, and can’t run away. That’s just how they defend themselves. We farm the ones we are well adapted to eat, but even with that and millennia of selective breeding it’s still not perfect. Ultra processed foods are bad for you because your health is not a priority for the people doing the processing, not because there is something inherently worse about industrially synthesized ingredients. They can be anything we want, and they are currently mostly addictive and only satisfying for a very short amount of time, but that is a decision, not an inherent flaw.
…i’m not speaking to health, only the vernacular meaning of ‘chemical’ ingredients…
I mean, the entire first point I made there was about how that was meaningless. Having the exact same chemical called a “chemical” sometimes and not others actively hurts our ability to communicate about what’s in our food. That’s not your fault, but it still bothers me.
Literally everything is made out of chemicals. Naturaphiles are loonyburgers.
Also: botulinum toxin, ricin, lead, uranium, ebola, rabies, the fucking sun… The list of completely natural things that can kill us in the most horrific ways imaginable is almost endless.
No thanks. I only eat photons.
I think it helps to understand that when some people say “chemicals” in the context of highly processed foods, they mean “industrial additives”.
Or maybe layman shouldn’t try to hijack scientifically precise words?
All kinds of weird shit you’d think would be vegan aren’t… like some brands of white sugar (bone char) and some beers (isinglass [fish swim bladders]). And there’s always our good friend with a million names, cochineal/carmine/crimson lake/natural red 4/E120, aka bugs that make your food red.
They sneak gelatin into so many things too. One that got me for a year or two after I went vegetarian was Altoids. I liked to keep em in my car to have something to munch/occupy myself while driving, and never even thought to check the ingredients. How could mints have animal in em? Turns out they have gelatin! I honestly never miss meat or anything, but I do miss gelatin to a degree. Not because I want gelatin in particular, but it’s in so many tasty things, and vegetarian gummies and the like are always so expensive ;_;
Also milk powder and whey - there’s so many god damn chips where you go “why the fuck does that need milk powder?”
The real answer to that question is the dairy industry. Same reason there’s high fructose corn syrup in so many random things - corn industry.
Yup it costs food processors next to nothing due to the subsidized overproduction.
Dammit I shouldn’t be subscribed to Belle Delphine then I guess.
At least it has the juice, I suppose
And tbf, I can’t imagine a more beautiful thing
i was about to recommend katyes, because they are great and cost like 1€ a bag in local stores, but apparently, thats 5€ on amazon (fuck amazon), so unless u can get them locally, thats not exactly a good option :<
Yeah, I’ve had (many of…) them while overseas and they’re probably some of my favorite veggie gummies, but sadly quite expensive back here in the states. They’re a precious part of my luggage returning ahaha, maybe not entirely a bad thing I can’t get them quite that cheap here… that and freia chocolate
Not to say your wrong, but I personally don’t understand this strict adherence to pretty arbitrary rules. I agree with the idea of vegan/vegetarian, as a way to protest animal mistreatment and the increased resources animals consume. However, that amount of gelatin is not playing a factor in that. It’s also not hurting you at all. I’m curious what makes you be so strict?
I can’t speak for them, but:
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I found gelatin kind of disgusting even before going vegetarian, and many vegetarians, including past me, grow more disgusted after they become vegetarian. You typically also inform yourself more and learn of various foods with gelatin, where you might’ve found the thought disgusting even beforehand.
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I can empathize with your point that these mints contain so little gelatin that it hardly matters, since they really do contain very little gelatin. But vegetarianism often follows shortly after you decide that “my impact doesn’t matter” isn’t a valid argument for not doing your best anyways, as that’s also typically the excuse for still eating meat for as long as you did, when you had already decided that it’s immoral.
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It’s often easier to not eat something at all than to make exceptions, because you have to inform yourself on the impact for the latter. This may be an impossible task, because you will find hardly any information for the concrete supply chain of the product you’re looking at.
For example, I would be morally a-ok with eating gelatin, if it came from the bones of cows that died of natural causes. Cows dying of natural causes is practically not a thing, but leaving that aside, I’d need to know the gelatin suppliers and their bone suppliers and would need independent audits of them to have even a chance of knowing the impact. Compare that to just looking for a greenVon the packaging or quickly scanning the ingredient list. I may be a moral Goody Two-Shoes, but I’m also lazy.
I realized I forgot to reply here, but you covered it all pretty thoroughly! I don’t find it appetizing anymore, though I do miss the texture of gummies and still hope to find something closer to it than pectin, but trying to jump through all the mental hoops to justify it etc just ain’t worth it. I draw a pretty simple line at whether an animal dies for something or not, and that works well for me. It isn’t particularly difficult to find alternatives to stuff like altoids either, though I will say I like their classier metal tin ahaha. But I just gave them away and bought something else, easy peasy
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I’ll just stick to limiting my meat intake.
For more than a decade I was discouraged to ever begin thinking about going vegan, because all the vocal internet vegans convinced me that unless everything I eat, wear, own, come in contact with or thing about, never ever touched something that touched something that touched an animal, I am basically a Hitler, and just as bad as those all meat weirdos. You either holier than everyone, or you’re the worst monster possible. Vegetarians are worse than meateaters because they want the vegan superpower but don’t do the whole penance. And they all equally monsters, and if I just stop eating meat I might as well eat people alive.
Bullshit like that hypnotised me for way longer than I am happy to admit.
Beer is safe here in Germany! :D We’ve got a thing called “Deutsches Reinheitsgebot”/“The German Law of Purity”, that prohibits the use of anything but water, barley, hops and yeast in making beer. So the beer itself is always vegan, you just have to watch out for little dumb stuff like the brand Bitburger using Milk-based glue for the labels on their glass beer bottles.
That is not true.
Filtrate medium is not considered to be an ingredient, nor are additives that are removed by filtration except for technically impossible residue. This most notably includes PVPP as a coagulation agents to remove polyphenols which otherwise could help in the formation of haze when the beer is stored improperly or over longer times.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinylpolypyrrolidone
So no, beer in Germany does not have to be vegan by default.
PVPP is vegan though, but isinglass isn’t
I know. It is just that there is articles every now and then that complain about “plastic in beer” and reference the fact that this is not a violation of the German purity law.
Does PVPP come from animal products? Everything I could find about it suggests petrochemicals. Which is technically vegan. *ahem* “Vegan leather” *ahem*.
It is not an animal product. It came to my mind as an example because every other year or so i see articles complaining about “plastic in beer” being allowed in Germany.
Using isinglass, which comes from fish, for filtration is not common in industrial breweries in Germany, but it also isn’t prohibited. Industrial breweries mostly use diatomaceous earth filters. So in a first step they mix the beer with the PVPP so that coagulation can occur. Water is mixed with diatomaceous earth and run through a filter sieve, where the diatomaceous earth is retained and forms a filter cake and then the beer is run through that filter, removing almost all of the PVPP.
A similar process can be done using the isinglass instead of the PVPP and using isinglass is more common for filtration of wine.
So most beer probably is vegan (aside from the traces of insects and rodents that made it into the grain-silo), but there is no legal guarantee that every product made according to the German purity law is vegan.
Damn, I didn’t know about the sugar and beer. Guess i gotta look up what I’m drinking
This will help
But yeah beer is weird. Some places use some weird shit as filtering agents
Thanks :)
tell me one food that isn’t made of chemicals
What, you aren’t on the dark matter diet yet?
Imaginary corn.
Is the Glow Cloud vegan?
Is sunlight considered plant food? Also there are fungi that feed on ionizing radiation.
🎶 Now you can eat sunlight! 🎵
Sunlight
You have a point.
From my understanding the only way to get sunlight into your body as nourishment is via the butthole.
That’s what I’ve heard anyways.
Sugar? It’s made of chemical.
I’m confused. I thought veganism was about animal welfare, what does it have to do with food being made out of chemicals?
Hi Vegan 1!
The same exact compounds found in food and other products can either originate from an animal or a non-animal source. Veganism is about avoiding the animal sources. The compound itself is mostly irrelevant.
it is but it’s also hitched to “crunchy” culture, which has some weird braindead threads running through it about body purity and “nature = good”.
So I’m a vegan. The 2 types of vegans I see are these:
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The terror vegan: “Everyone who isn’t 100% vegan is a genocidal nazi and I’ll make sure to tell them constantly.” aka the ones that give veganism a bad name.
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The normal vegan: “When it comes to pollution, the mega corps are at failt. But when it comes to animal product consumption, the consumer is the driving factor. I can’t expect everyone to become a vegan, but it would already help a lot if everyone would start to consume a bit less. Like once or twice a week no meat. But if you won’t I wouldn’t hold it against you, we’re still friends after all.” aka the vegan I’d like to be.
Sadly there’s extremism in every field.
I don’t think I’ve met #1 in real life, besides knowing more than a few of #2. The first one just gets really loud on the Internet.
Oh I’ve met plenty. And I try to stay clear of them
I’m a meat eater. I like meat. I consider myself someone who eats meat regularly. That means I eat, like, one slice of ham and 5 köttbular in a month. And I might treat myself to a salad with chicken breast in a restaurant when I manage to quiet down the voice in my head complaining about the chicken most likely not being farmed very well. Whenever I read a sentiment like “try to not eat meat 1 or 2 days in a week” I am reminded that there are really people out there who just, like, buy meat every single time they are in the grocery store and cook it daily. That seems so nuts to me.
Depending on the location, I’m pretty sure the norm is meat every day. In the Midwest, it’s not just meat every day. It’s meat every meal.
That’s crazy but I also notice that amongst people eating crazy amount of meat there is a lot of people that only eat a few types of meat (pork, beef, chicken, turkey and always the same cut).
I eat meat once every 10 days plus on party days. But I eat so much more diversity than these canivorous eaters. What about lamb, veal, mutton, duck, rabbit? What about tongues, giblets and so on? They say they love meat taste but it is like it is only when the taste is mild enough.
I actually had a super chill vegan patient the other day who was aging remarkably gracefully into trailer-trash (my own cultural roots), complete with 40 pack-year smoker’s voice and skin that belongs in a cancer PSA. They told me they aren’t completely married to the idea but that they do their best and would like to be able to read the labels on what they get if possible. They pointed out that their breakfast tray arrived with biscuits and sugar and commented that the biscuits were almost certainly made with eggs and butter, and that the sugar was probably bleached using animal products (not sure about that one). I definitely didn’t have anything decent to say about the biscuit thing. For them it was definitely more about the animal welfare thing than the chemical thing. They were pretty frank about not being too fussy about the chemicals that went into their body.
To me it’s 3 things why I’m vegan (although I do eat cheese sometimes, there’s no proper substitute and I’m a Dutch cheese head).
- Animal cruelty
- Health
- Enviroment
So I prefer to substitute meat with beans for example, instead of heavily processed fake meat. Although sometimes a proper vegan burger, like the BeyondBurger, is nice (unhealthy) comfort food. Also on holiday to Cambodia I did eat some meat as I wanted to experience the original Cambodian cuisine. That was the first time in 12 years I ate meat and it got me food poisoning which resulted in a heavy stomach infection. Worth it though, the Cambodians know how to cook!
I don’t think the consumer is primarily responsible for determining how animal agriculture operates. Even the demand for meat and dairy was and is coercively and artificially manufactured.
(Small example: a Tyson executive uses university ag programs to setup chicken farming in rural parts of Africa, and the locals there do not eat chicken and are forced to eat chickens under the contract as a condition to get access to the capital - the goal is to setup the whole market, generate both demand and supply for chicken meat in this rural part of Africa.)
The US government uses taxes to buy up dairy and meat that was not purchased based on demand, nullifying individual vegan boycotts and artificially propping up those industries.
Veganism is not primarily helpful by reducing the demand on the individual level, but instead has found the greatest successes from lobbying governments to pass animal welfare laws and organizing protests to generate pressure and support for those laws.
The US government uses taxes to buy up dairy and meat that was not purchased based on demand, nullifying individual vegan boycotts and artificially propping up those industries.
That’s taking a really short term view of it. As demand has stayed low enough for long enough, they have cut back on the amount and paid dairy farmers to not operate. These kinds of programs can only prop something up for so long
but instead has found the greatest successes from lobbying governments to pass animal welfare laws and organizing protests to generate pressure and support for those laws
Animal welfare laws do not fix the fundamental issue with these systems. As long as the industry exists in a large scale capacity, it will find the cruelest ways to operate. As long as meat, dairy, etc. are consumed in mass, factory farming will exist
For instance, US beef consumption cannot be supplied by a pasture-based system. There is only enough land to support 27% of the consumption, and that still raises methane emissions by 8% so we would need to be consuming even less if we wanted to avoid emission reductions from a move like that
Various laws and larger action can be effective though. Like putting plant-based options by default has been tested in some places, has substantially reduced demand and still kept satisfaction high. Or things like prohibiting the production of Fur, Foie Gras, etc.
I tend to agree, in the long term there has to be a cultural shift and my point is only that the hyper-individualist approach to American veganism is myopic and focused on the wrong actions and for the wrong reasons, treating the act of putting animal products in the body as the biggest sin when the harms are primarily systemic and not best tackled through individual lifestyle changes. This is like thinking you can end capitalism by just buying from cooperatives or fix climate change by not using plastic straws and recycling.
Even in terms of individual-scope action, you could make stronger arguments for engaging in workplace organizing in Tyson factories, tax resistance, and collaborating with local vegan activists to stage protests or direct actions.
Not that I’m down on veganism, just that I think the portrayal of responsibility primarily falling on you, the average consumer, is emphasized too much and makes a convenient scapegoat for the ag corporations that are making all the decisions that create the atrocities we know about. Ultimately that scapegoating is not veganism, it’s a strawman, but it is maybe how most people think about vegansim, including many vegans I know - it’s all about individual lifestyle choices and taking individual responsibility while not participating or engaging meaningfully in collective action or analyzing the problem structurally.
In addition to everything you mentioned it’s also heavily subsidized as a baseline with >38B in subsidies vs the 170.38B meat market and 74.16B dairy market. Direct subsidies alone account for 15% of the total market.
greatest successes from lobbying governments to pass animal welfare laws and organizing protests to generate pressure and support for those laws.
It’s worth noting that it’s more often the ‘type 1’ vegan which is generally more effective at this, and why they’re seen as ecoterrorists and why things like ag-gag laws “needed” to be passed.
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A better question is “is this ultra processed”
Like, is this a product comprised mostly highly refined and modified ingredients? And thus is it likely to have had important nutritional components removed?
In all likelihood, none of the actual ingredients are actively bad for you in moderation, but, it’ll be nutritionally lacking.
People don’t seem to understand that even chemicals are made of something. They’re not synthesized out of thin air. It is not stupid to ask what they’re made of. The resources can be very diverse.
The “something” in question is elements. Barring the very inadvisable edge case where you’re ingesting some kind of pure metal or degenerate matter there is not anything you can eat that does not contain chemicals.
Complaining about a food containing “chemicals” makes about as much sense as calling out the software you use for being compiled from “code”.
Yes, but what I meant was, for example, artificial vanilla flavour is a chemical, which used to be made from cloves oil, now is made from wood compounds. The processes and ingrediences needed to produce it are also diverse and interesting.
Chemicals can also be non vegan. Side note: for a long time (might still be) camera film wasn’t vegan, since it used bovine gelatin. Kodak Eastman even had their own cow ranch to supply all the bones. (Goes to show chemicals don’t have to be vegan)
Goes to show chemicals don’t have to be vegan
There is a lot of them. In the EU classification of food additif, anything under the E47 categorie can either be animal or vegetal. E471 for example could be either pork skin, beef bones, fish bones, palm or coconut oil derivative. Nicely wrapped and served in so many bread and brioche product to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, vegetarians and vegans.
And there is so many more that are straight up animal products but presented in a latin name. In France, industrials even started to used Canadian french terms to confuse people when the insect additives for colours and textures started to gross out to many people.
Me, crushing up blood-cruelty cocaine in a tiny one-cent plastic baggie: “I really hope this baggie doesn’t have PFAS in it…”
Everything is made of chemicals
The whole ‘duh, everything is made of chemicals’ argument is a corporate attempt at downplaying the prevalence of unnecessary and even harmful additives in US foods that have long been banned in the EU.
Next time you see a meme about a woman asking ‘is this ham processed?’ with a response ridiculing her about it, look up Ractopmine.
This terminology people use without knowing anything about anything is actually corporate thing. It might originated from uneducated scared hippies, but it became popular and prevalent after corpos discovered that this kind of language allows them to greenwash the shit out of their products for free. “Other ham is made of chemicals, but ours is organic!” is technically correct phrase that is insidiously lying right to your chemistry-101-failed-face.
All this bullshit just stops the conversation about corporate accountability, or about actual implications of a specific diet, this conversations are impossible to have when your starting point is “chemicals bad”.Next time you ask “if this ham processed”, remember that the only correct answer to this is yes, otherwise the ham os oinking and tries to run away when you’re trying to bite it.
I live with two junkfood vegans and oh my god dude. I’m literally broke and eating from food banks and my diet is less bad than theirs.
Junk vegans are truly majestic creatures
