Thursday 28 December 2006

Vegan Success

The chinese meal went down really well last night. I did sweet and sour vegetables, mushrooms with cashews and spring onions in black bean sauce with noodles and rice. Everyone had seconds and enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately I forgot to take any photos.

I do have a photo of the kids dessert though, which is also todays recipe on the recipes for vegans site http://www.recipesforvegans.co.uk.



They are delicious chocolate crispy cakes. They are very easy for the kids to help you make, and never last very long!

I was looking through a vegan hamper I had for Christmas today. One of the items are a packet of biscuits which on the front say they are vegan, but on the back by the ingredients say they may contain traces of egg. How can this possibly be vegan, and how can they get away with calling them vegan? Does anyone have any idea how the labelling of products work, and whether it means that other items that may not necessarily be vegan could be labelled as such?

3 comments:

Rachel said...

I would only assume that products which had been approved by the vegan society were truly vegan.

Anonymous said...

I would assume that only items labelled as approved y the vegan society were truly vegan.

Anonymous said...

It's a difficult one really - even your veg can't be *guaranteed* to be 100% vegan - there could be a tiny insect in with the sprouts or part of a worm in a potato... certain environmental contaminants are not truly possible to remove entirely.

Yes, that's nit-picking, but you get the point. However, if something is *labelled* as vegan, you'd expect the manufacturer to take reasonable precautions to preclude *eggs* from their processes! Presumably they mean *chicken* eggs - which are relatively easy to exclude. It probably means that the manufacturing facility also does production runs that contain eggs as an ingredient, or that one of their suppliers does.

Of course, the devil is in the details: the word "traces" is key here. They're not saying the *put* egg in - just that it might "creep" in somewhere. It's probably due to some legal requirement having more to do with allergies than the vegan society - if someone with an egg allergy died from eating these biscuits, they'd be covered, because they disclosed it on the packaging. Not very reassuring, I'm sure.

regards,
-cybervegan