I went to Whole Paycheck today to get some ingredients for an asparagus tart and a strawberry balsamic gelato. I'm in the sugar section contemplating whether the extra cost that WP charges warrants the convenience and premium quality of their fair trade ultra-virtuous cane sugar, when I saw out of the corner of my eye, on the bottom shelf, a packet of sugar that proclaimed that it was vegan. Vegan. VEGAN. (I thought I'd bold it for you and repeat it three times in case you missed that.)
Vegan?
Um, as in the sugar contains no animal products or the sugar wasn't fed an animal-based diet??????????
Which compels me to start a list of top 10 idiotic food labels.
1. vegan sugar (as opposed to the carnivorous kind? The kind that eats eggs? The kind that has dairy products in it?)
2. organic salt (Salt=NaCl= a chemical (actually, a mineral to be precise). Moreover, most salt is iodized. Not to mention, isn't salt just harvested from the ocean? Someone please tell me how salt can be "organic".)
3. labeling something that has 0.49999999999999 grams of trans-fats "0 grams of trans-fats". Last I checked, 0 ≠0.499999999999999999. Or else my GPA in undergrad was a perfect 4.0.
Ok, I'll continue 4-10 in another thread, since I need to finish baking this tart.
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I initially had this ambitious idea that I would blog about my interests, which are food, music, travel and foreign policy, to name a few, but most likely, it will be much more modest in scope--probably just random silly thoughts.
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2 comments:
I think regular sugar does go through a refining process that uses some kind of animal product, but I can't remember off-hand what it is. So in theory, you can have vegan sugar. I don't understand the others on your list, though.
One I'd add is those companies that advertise their food as "all-natural." What does that even mean? That it grew in the ground? Regardless of the fact that the ground may have been saturated with chemical fertilizers and then sprayed with pesticides? Sigh...
Well I'll be damned. I didn't realize they process sugar with animal products. I feel like that's the kind of thing they should mention. . . not so much for me, but I do make things for people who are vegan.
Oh, as for the others,
-I was pointing out that calling salt "organic" seems kindof pointless or oxymoronic, since salt is itself a chemical (how can a chemical be chemical-free?) and is just harvested from the sea. . .
-And w/ transfats, I was objecting to the fact that the food industry is allowed to label something that has less than 0.5 grams of transfats per serving as having "zero grams" of transfat. Particularly, the girl scout cookies bug me, so I've stopped buying them. In some of their cookies, partially-hydrogenated oils is the second ingredient, so there is no way that the trans-fat content is "zero". But b/c one serving has under .5 grams, all girl scout cookies are labeled as having zero transfats.
And "all natural" is largely a scam, too. MSG can be "natural" depending on what it's derived from. Also, I forgot the specifics, but yogurts can list "natural strawberry flavorings" and not have any strawberries in the ingredients.
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