I'm confused. I thought veganism was about animal welfare, what does it have to do with food being made out of chemicals?
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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You always gotta check the chemicals to make sure they didn't sneak dairy in for some reason.
So I'm a vegan. The 2 types of vegans I see are these:
-
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.
-
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 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 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.
Everything is made of chemicals.
So we were talking in the car the other day about how yeast is alive (until it isn’t). How do vegans feel about yeast? Honestly asking; I don’t know any vegans irl that I can ask.
It's not a question of "Is it alive?", but rather "Is it capable of suffering?".
Since it's a fungus, I would expect there is no issue, just like eating any other mushroom. Plants are alive too; that's not the important category from a vegan perspective, I'd expect.
Which only leads to more questions, like "are 40k Orcs vegan?"
That is rather kingdom-ish of them them. I will eat things in these 3 kingdoms, but not these 2. There must be more to it, but I also no little about veganism.
Veganism is about not viewing animals as a product. It's about taking a moral and ethical stance against the animal industry.
Plants and fungi are vastly different from animals in behavior, looks, genetics, etc. You're creating a strawman argument here.
So finding an alien species it would be ok to eat.
I think that would be a thing to be cleared based on circumstances!
I was trying to be funny, not argue.
Sorry.
There are loads of different reasons that people become vegan. Some of those reasons might include not wanting to harm any living being, and if that's the reason then yeah it is a little arbitrary to draw the line at plants or types of plant-life, but I'm not sure it's really fair to place the expectations that vegans do not make any arbitrary choices like that.
Everybody sets those kinds of boundaries and makes those kinds of choices all the time, because it would be very hard not to, and I think making an honest attempt to reduce the harm you do to living beings is better than nothing 🤷♂️
That being said, I'm not vegan.
I'm pretty sure most of everything you could possibly ever eat (even "chemicals") comes from something alive, so the alternative would be starvation.
if it's not made from animals, plants or fungi then from single celled organisms like bacteria and slime mold.
and veganism isn't just a blind disagreement with eating one kingdom of biology, it's a means to reduce harm, suffering, exploitation and killing. of course other kingdoms are alive, and in case we make it and sometime in the future we can somehow find viable, plentiful, cheap dead sources of all our nutrients there might be people who want to switch to those exclusively, but right now i think it's a fairly measured movement.
Basically what a vegan explained when I asked the same
I mean, plants are alive as well
tell me one food that isn't made of chemicals
What, you aren't on the dark matter diet yet?
Is sunlight considered plant food? Also there are fungi that feed on ionizing radiation.
🎶 Now you can eat sunlight! 🎵
Imaginary corn.
Is the Glow Cloud vegan?
Sugar? It's made of chemical.
Dear vegan 2, that is true for everything.
"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
Dihydrogen monoxide
Hydrogen hydroxide
That stuff can kill you in minutes
It's got the highest pH rating of any acid we know of.
Get thee behind me, Satan, I shan't drink your hellish brew!
Oreos are technically vegan. You're welcome.
As are potatoes. Even if you quarter them, spray them with oil, add a few seasons, and air fry them for 15 minutes. Still vegan.
Also Nutter Butters and Marizpan Ritter Sport.
I read last year that they were changing the recipe to include fucking powdered milk (the most annoying ingredient). I don’t know if that was planned for the future or just incorrect speculation, because I can’t find anything about it now.
We used to call them "accidentally vegan"
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.
I'll just stick to limiting my meat intake.
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.
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?"
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 :<
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