Another Soulless Atheist

Speaking as a vegan who likes to cook and who used to love meat, that's total bullshit, still. You can make fantastic tasting food without MSG or meat broth. And it's not a lot of extra work/expense either.

Either way, you must admit, it's pretty dang irritating. It's hard enough to find food when eating out at "mainstream" food chains. Being vegan when cooking for yourself is damn easy, but when I'm out, I end up giving the impression to others that it's hard to be vegetarian/vegan because the nationwide chains aren't keeping us in mind when designing their menus. It's almost never an issue at locally-owned places...geezus, there's half a dozen vegan restaurants around here and several more vegetarian ones....and even the ones catering to omnis have something on their menu I can eat, because they are aware that lots of people have vegetarian/vegan friends.

*still pissy*

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tanjent.livejournal.com

true, you can make fantastic-tasting food without MSG or meat broth, but you have to use tasty ingredients to start with, which would then be more expensive and cause the restaurant to make less profit, which is then a big issue at chains that rely on turning a reliable profit so as to benefit the franchisees and the shareholders.

it's the same reason that virtually all cheap spaghetti sauce (and salad dressing, and canned fruits/vegetables, etcetera etcetera) contains corn syrup - the additives make poor-quality ingredients taste palatable.

given the choice between using high-quality (tasty, expensive) ingredients and using lower-quality (less-tasty, cheap) ingredients plus cheap additives (corn syrup, msg, chicken broth) to cover up the off-flavors, most food businesses will choose the latter.

-tanjent

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I'm with you 100%. Food at the grocery store is often non-vegetarian out of the blue. Like stuff that just has no need for a meat product in it will have chicken fat or similar. Ding-dongs come to mind. Stove top stuffing - the veggie stove top stuffing - has chicken in it. WTF?

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Ding Dongs have chicken fat? OMG no more ding dongs for me then. :)

Just kidding. Not that I'll start eating ding dongs anytime soon. The frosting gives me heart burn. Same with pop tarts.

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axiom.livejournal.com

I read that as "pop farts."

Just thought you would want to know.

(This is me having nothing to add to the conversation.)

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FLASHBAAAAACK!

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5minutelimit.livejournal.com

"Pop farts" is very hard to say, btw.
(And Doug just said "But easy to do!")

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sorry. i did not mean to imply that ding dongs had chicken fat. i must fire my editor. It's the 'may or may not contain beef tallow" that is the problem.

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glitterninja.livejournal.com

Weren't Ding-Dongs (and Ho-Ho's and Chocodiles, for that matter) a "may or may not contain beef fat" thing? I assume that it depends on which production facility they're made at??? Gives me the creeps.

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chocodiles? Yall are just making things up now.

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glitterninja.livejournal.com

No, seriously, I swear! I think it has something to do with either the chocolate covering or the filling. I'm not sure which. The label definitiely said may or may not contain beef fat. And I LOVE chocodiles. Travesty, it is!

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alicia-stardust.livejournal.com

DUDE!

And to think my friends and I used to skip out of class, walk to the store, buy a *box* of ho-ho's, and eat the whole thing at once. But little did I know! WTF, it's a "dessert"! LOL

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exactly! What's it got to have dead animals in it for? And don't even get me started on all the random crap that has gelatin unnecessarily. Guh. Must read labels. =-)

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Like frosted mini-wheats. I swear I almost cried when I saw that. Or Lucky Charms. That at least makes sense, it's got marshmallows.

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http://www.cfarm.com/cfarm/products/nutrition.asp?prod=0-21908-34645-8
(that's a link to the nutritional info for Clifford Crunch)
I'm not sure what tapioca is exactly 0_o (I think it's vegan, but I dunno for sure) But Clifford Crunch is much like Lucky Charms minus the disgusting, overly sweet marshmellows. I think they are a lot better than lucky charms. now granted, Cascadian Farms = General Mills, but at least they're organic.

Kashi (another subsidy of a giant food corp) makes Autumn Wheat (nutritional info = http://www.kashi.com/organic_promise_aw.aspx?SID=1&Category_ID=56&Link_ID=24& )
which kicks the crap out of miniwheats for sweetened, small shredded wheat. Barbara's still makes the best shredded wheat. I mean - check out the ingredients here:
http://www.barbarasbakery.com/products/cerealproddisplay.asp?product=57&category=16
Plus Barabara's - not sold out yet!

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Barbara's shredded wheat isn't frosted. And my favorite part of lucky charms was the marshmallows. I have a sweet tooth from hell, remember?

Tapioca is a kind of grain. Definitely vegan. Large tapiocas are the "bubbles" in bubble tea (aka boba tea).

Re: Giant food corps: Silk soy milk, and all White Wave soy products, are owned by a huge diary company. Which blows, because Silk is my favorite kind of soy milk. I normally by Pacific now, though. Except for Silk's fake eggnog....I buy that anyway. *lol* I won't buy anything from Nabisco, Kraft, Toblerone, Folger's.....they're all owned by PHilip Morris. Yeay.

I generally only buy hot cereal these days anyway, or generic cheerio's. Dry cereal is just too damn expensive.

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Actually tapioca is a starch. It comes from the casava or yuca root. The mayans were the first people who figured out how to eat it. The casava contains lots of cyanide which they extracted as poison for darts, leaving the root to be used as a thickener. The root is ground into a flour and then forced through a seive to make the pearls. Large bubbles for bubble tea just use a larger mesh than small pearls. The starch is also used in making paper and textiles.

For its use as a poisoning agent in paper read Umberto Eco's Foucaults Pendulum. Except that gives away the ending so disregard that part.

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That kicks ass that you know that!

Yeay, more trivia for me to be able to randomly spout.

I saw candles made from tapioca wax once....hm.

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Cattails (you know the fuzzy things that grow in swamp land, I can't think of their real name right now) the root of those can also be eaten. It tastes very similar to a turnip but more floury.

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I did know about the cattail thing. Living in Virginia and all that. Never tried them though.

Is it random trivia night?

While in a game store on our...what, second date?

infernarl and I went into Rainy Day Games, and I pointed out that I'm not so good at strategy games, but I'm good at trivia. He asked me where the word trivia came from. I said, it's the name of a Roman goddess of crossroads. He blinked and replied, Oh, I didn't think you'd actually know that! I was mostly joking!

How did that word get its current meaning? That, I don't know. *looks it up* Hm. It became the word for some of the subjects taught in classical schools--grammar and logic and rhetoric. Still, odd etymology.

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Santa Cruz is owned by smuckers. I almost cried when i discovered that. The Hain line of foods is still cool with me. That includes WestSoy, which is my fav soy milk. But yeah, Chocolate Silk makes me happy. It's still better then buying the crap from the rest of the store, you know?

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Something someone pointed out: All these huge food corporations....isn't it a good thing if they're making a profit from organic/environmentally friendly foods? Doesn't the easy availability of them due to their large-ness make it a good thing (aka you can get it at Safeway, for pete's sake)?? Wouldn't it be better for Philip Morris to make a profit at things that aren't tobacco?

Hard to answer....

But, still....large agribusinesses are destroying small farms, and that's not good either.

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So many random things have animal products that don't need them. Why do so many things have whey or egg whites as their last or next-to-last ingredient? It's maddening.

I'm getting good at cooking from scratch or almost-scratch. Wheeeee...

Also,

vegancooking is the shiznit, yo. I saw a recipe for cinnnamon rolls in there. I'm so going to make some at some point. Fuck Cinnabon, man.

An odd reason I eat less junk food as a vegan: Well, store-bought donuts aren't vegan. Yes, I could make them myself. But what a pain in the ass....so I only make things like that when I really want them. I therefore eat less of them, go me.

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alicia-stardust.livejournal.com

On the subject...

I recently wrote an email to Cucina Cucina's customer service complaining about their new menu offering and how there's no longer any vegetarian dishes. It must have gotten to someone important, because I got a response saying that they were meeting to re-evaluate their new menu offerings. And then a week after that, they mailed me a $25 gift card to go eat at Cucina, try one of their new dishes, and review it. LOL.

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glitterninja.livejournal.com

Yay! Way to go! That's cool. I've never gotten a response to any of my letters. :)

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I wrote Double Rainbow complaining that one of their "all natural" soy desserts had high fructose corn syrup in it. It was an ingredient in the fudge chunks. They wrote back and i could tell that they were *embarassed*. They said they were trying to find a supplier of fudge chunks that didn't include corn syrup. First time i ever got a response like, "We know! and we're so sorry. we'll try to do better."

I love their soy creams... mmmmmmmmm.

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Random thought:

I know corn syrup isn't your favorite thing, but sugar is sugar is sugar. Whether it's white sugar or corn syrup or fruit sugar, or honey or maple syrup or brown rice syrup, it's the same thing. It acts in your body the same way.

For that matter, every one of those things is a processed food. Honey has to be filtered and (I believe) pastuerized. Maple Sryup is filtered and boiled down. Any kind of cane sugar, corn syrup, or rice syrup, is extracted from a plant and then filtered and concentrated.

So what's the big deal about corn syrup?

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High Fructose Corn Syrup is particularly fattening and completely useless for the body. No redeeming nutritional value. Sure, Evaporated cane juice isn't on the top ten list of most healthy foods, but it's undeniably closer to "whole" than HFCS, and has some redeeming qualities, such as energy the body can use in a healthy fashion.

In fact, there's almost no use for corn in the diet. Humans don't digest it well. It's filler. Take popcorn from me with a fight, but i admit it's useless.

Sometimes, overanalyzing *any* food product will lead you to conclude that it's not good. If we did that with everything, we'd eat next to nothing. I mean, wheat and soy? So my analysis goes so far and then stops for my own sanity.

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I'm still of the belief that sugar is sugar, no matter what the source.

Raw sugar (aka turbinado) does taste a little better. Some vegans won't eat white sugar because a lot of brands bleach it with bone char. There's no bone char left in the sugar, however. Same with beer. A substance made from fish scales is used to clarify/filter some beer and wine. By that measure, Guinness isn't vegan. Suckage.

Maple syrup is yummy and has a taste of its own (the darker kind is cheaper and tastier), so I'm likely to use less of it in oatmeal etc.

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Honestly, it's all about choices and doing the best we can for a particular circumstance. I buy the healthiest food I can while taking into account it's source, whether or not it's organic, is it local, etc. I just do the best I can given my current budget, etc. I'm not perfect. I buy some crap. I eat some junk. I have too much plastic in my house. I don't exercise enough... but then I go see how my family in illinois lives and fuck! at least I'm recycling, you know?

So I try, but i'm not perfect. Got the yummiest chocolate covered raisins at trader joe's today. Sugary, chocolately goodness.

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*giggle* One of these nights when we're out at the Fez or something, I'm going to make someone take me to Voodoo donuts--they have vegan donuts. Fresh ones!!

Food Fight! is a vegan store on Division I haven't been to yet, but they have every fake food (fake meat, cheese, marshmallows....) and vegan junkfood known to humanity. I'd go crazy, I just know it. There's a company that makes fake nacho cheese, and I so want some.

I know about the making choices thing. Sometimes I make everything from scratch and am very good. Sometimes I buy a bag of NewmanO's and eat half in one sitting, along with some Tings.

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