Answering common questions about what foods and products are vegan.
Sugar can be a perplexing subject for new vegans because a lot of white cane sugar gets processed using animal bone char. There’s a whole big vegan debate about refined sugar and whether we need to boycott it or … Read more
The other day, I saw the ingredient “croscarmellose sodium” listed on the package for some multivitamins. Besides that one ingredient, all the other ingredients seemed very simple and straight-forward… So as a label-reading vegan, I became curious. Is croscarmellose … Read more
For vegans and those with lactose/dairy issues, any ingredient including “lacto” in the name tends to raise concerns. But as we’ve seen with other ingredients (like lactic acid), it doesn’t always mean the food contains milk. So what about … Read more
To combat the idea that vegans are small and weak, many of us like to cite the fact that elephants, gorillas, and other big animals eat vegan diets, too. But in my 14 years of being vegan, I’ve actually … Read more
I remember when I first went vegan, I went to the grocery store and read the ingredients on all the bread. I remember being stumped by this ingredient: Sodium stearoyl lactylate. “Lactylate” sounds like it could be from milk… … Read more
I recently saw “potassium sorbate” listed in the ingredients for some apple cider I was drinking. Turns out, it’s a common food preservative. But since I’m a nerdy vegan who likes to know what I’m actually eating, I decided … Read more
Would it be worrisome for you to discover that one of your food ingredients is also an ingredient in antifreeze? Well, that’s the case with propylene glycol—and it does concern some people. As a compulsive vegan label reader, I … Read more
As a vegan, it’s easy to become suspicious of pretty much any ingredient you don’t recognize. So when you see “ascorbic acid,” you may not realize that it’s actually just another name for vitamin C. But even after you … Read more
Lately, I’ve been looking up a bunch of food preservatives to see if they’re vegan. Sodium benzoate is an interesting one. By the end of my research, I was reading about a weird liquid taken from sacs on the … Read more
I remember when I first went vegan 14 years ago, it was a little overwhelming to see all the chemical names in ingredient lists. I had no idea what something like “silicon dioxide” could be. But over time, I … Read more