Are you a Self Exhausting Microgram-Oriented Vegan?

Imagine you decided to go vegan September 1 2003 while eating a beef. You were supposed to eat a 180g beef fillet, but while eating that meal, you found out that enough is enough: only non-animal ingredients from now on.

So you bought some books, surfed the net and found out about animal ingredients in products you didn't think of, a few micrograms here and a few micrograms there. The first week you became very busy reading labels.

So far, so good - nothing is better than if as many people as possible stay away from animal products as much as possible: we all agree in that.

(Of course writing one of the companies and request them to make the product in question without animal ingredients in it may be a lot more effective - but that's another story.)

Some vegans are 'obsessed' with labels and avoid micrograms because it's important for them, it feels right/it makes them feel better. Others find it exhausting, and would feel guilty if they claimed to be a vegan and consumed a few micrograms of animal products now and then. If avoiding every animal products on a microgram level feels right/good, great; and since every microgram helps, it helps animals too. If not, read on.

Some people find the idea of going vegan exhausting, for example if they read descriptions keeping old myths about stereotypical vegans obsessed with reading labels alive. ;)

Let's say that you find a product that has added 3 microgram something which is animal derived, or which may be animal derived - but you don't know if it is.


180g meat = 6 ounces
180g = 180,000 milligrams = 180,000,000 micrograms.

Before I continue: Please don't get me wrong, I'm of course not at all suggesting that you should use animal products.

If you would go vegan a few hours later that day in 2003, you would have been eating 180,000,000 micrograms of animal products, which equals eating a product with 3 mcg animal products in it every day for 60,000,000 days. That's more than 164,383 years. Even on a vegan diet, you won't live that long.

It would take 164383 years of avoiding those 3 micrograms of that animal product to achieve the same effect (in terms of saving animals) as if you would have gone vegan after dinner instead of before dinner that day in September 2003.

I bring this up because some vegans may find it exhausting to avoid those microscopic amounts of animal products in their daily lives, and some potential vegans may think that going vegan may be difficult since there sometimes are animal products in unexpected places. They may even be suffering from perfectionism on a neurotic level, and think that 'if I can't be 100% vegan, I'll skip it'...

I used 3mcg as an example... it popped into my ming because that's the amount of B12 that often is mentioned as a daily requirement of B12. Now, many vegans don't eat supplements, and there are lots of B12 supplements containing non-animal based B12, so getting vegan B12 of course isn't a problem at all.

But to the 'Semovs' out there: don't exhaust yourself and use those tiny, tiny amounts of something as an excuse to say that it's going to be hard to continue to be vegan. You may spend a lot of time in achieving something that in terms of saving animals only represents the difference that you would have achieved if you had gone vegan a few minutes or actually seconds earlier. Or even less: see below.

We don't live for 164,383 years. Maybe we'll become 80? 16383/80 = circa 2000.

Sorry for bringing up that bloody beef again, but if it takes 10 minutes to eat it... that's 600 seconds, and 600/2000 = 0,3 seconds.

These daily 3 mcg of something animal derived for a whole life equals, (measured in a somewhat silly gram pr. gram setup, I know), the same amount of animal products that you would have avoided by becoming vegan 0.3 seconds earlier than you did - if you became vegan in the middle of eating that meal three years ago. Please don't get lost in the numbers, they are are only simplified, constructed and silly examples. A scientific comparison of the two ways of consuming/producing animal products would have to take a lot more factors into consideration.


Sorry for the long post... For some people those perspectives are totally un-intersting, but they may be useful for others.

I think the point you raise that some people go for an all or nothing approach then claim they can't be vegan and don't give it a proper go is a valid one. Personally I'd rather every meat eater in the world cut down their intake than 1% of them turn vegan. If anyone starts eating less animal products then that's great - I don't care whether they identify as vegan or not.

However for those who live in areas where veganism is pretty easy (UK, US, many EU countries etc) I don't believe that being as vegan as you can to the best of your knowledge is too much of a feat for the average person. Of course, no vegan is 100% vegan, I've said many times that I think those who claim they are are suffering delusion. My problem with encouraging the word vegan being used to describe people who consume/products that contain animal ingredients (however small) will not be a good thing at all. Not everything we buy we can be sure of the ingredients and have to rely on the word of the companies (restuarants, drinks, clothing manufacturers etc). If it becomes acceptable to claim a product is vegan when it is not then that will not be a good thing.

To me veganism is partly about personal choice and activism. I personally choose not to consume any animal products to the best of my knowledge. From an activism perspective (i.e. changing the situation) I also boycott many companies that have very non vegan/ethical practices and regularly write to both them and companies that I am unsure about. I think the activism side of it is important and I have no desire to either consume products from/that or encourage others (when there such a large choice of alternatives) to which contain animal ingredients or those which have involves animal use (such as testing). To me that's the exact opposite of what I'm trying to achieve.

I agree that you would need to be a bit more scientific about things and your calculation is crude to say the least. For example, 1kg of cochineal or shellec is responsible for the death of countless more animals than 1kg of beef. As they are generally highly concentrated, a few micrograms of flavouring is all you ever get in a product. If you accept that it's fine to eat flavourings that contain or have been tested on animals then by never caring about them you're in effect saying that the whole flavourings industry using vivisection and animal products is OK.

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Mr Flibble

However for those who live in areas where veganism is pretty easy (UK, US, many EU countries etc) I don't believe that being as vegan as you can to the best of your knowledge is too much of a feat for the average person.

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I think being vegan is easy, and for people who live in areas/ways that makes it easy for them to become and remain vegans, they you wouldn't even be close to self-exhausting which this thread is about. :)

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My problem with encouraging the word vegan being used to describe people who consume/products that contain animal ingredients (however small) will not be a good thing at all.

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I agree. The definition vegan already refers to avoiding animal products as much as practical and possible, and I'd like to add 'please make sure you do it in a way that will let you be able to continue to be vegan more than just a few weeks, months or years'.

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I agree that you would need to be a bit more scientific about things and your calculation is crude to say the least. For example, 1kg of cochineal or shellec is responsible for the death of countless more animals than 1kg of beef.

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Sure. Number games like these will always be absurd and normally misleading. For example, to eat 50 kg fish or chicken, you'd eat to kill a lot more sentient beings compared to eating beef from, say, an oz which weigh several hundred kg's. I don't know how many kg's animal one need to produce to produce a kg beef, I don't even want to think about it. Maybe my example above is 1000% wrong, meaning that you can replace 0.3 seconds with 3 seconds. As I said, it's only an example to illustrate a certain perspective some people may have missed.

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by never caring about them you're in effect saying that the whole flavourings industry using vivisection and animal products is OK.

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'Never caring about' is very different from focusing so much on something that it exhausts you...

But of course we all agree, and don't want animal flavorings on our plate.

I totally agree with you both. I think the focus on vegan purity is misdirected energy and it can become a little dogmatic, with people taking up veganer-than-thou attitudes.

The important thing to remember is that if the meat and dairy industries were to fall, most of the animal-based byproducts that we wouldn't ordinarily expect to be in (otherwise vegan) foods would no longer be used.

So the focus should be, as already stated, on activism, which will do far more to raise awareness of and convert people to animal rights than will religiously scrutinising labels, which could well give off the impression that veganism is hard work. And it isn't, really.

That said I don't condone the consumption of any product with animal-based byproducts as a main ingredient, this is referring to trace elements only.

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Korn

The definition vegan already refers to avoiding animal products as much as practical and possible, and I'd like to add 'please make sure you do it in a way that will let you be able to continue to be vegan more than just a few weeks, months or years.

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Absolutely. I find it easy to live my own life by weeding out everything animal derived I can find. If someone asks me what it's like being vegan, I tell them it's easy and there's a lot of help available :)

The chore in life is other people, not veganism per se.

"Even on a vegan diet, you won't live that long."

hehehe

I agree that obsessing over all of the technical vegan stuff can make a person choose not to be vegan. Technically speeking, according to this boards definition of a vegan, I am not one. But I really am. Let me explain:
My goal in life is to become a vegan pastry chef, and to open up my own little vegan pastry shop. However, to get to that point I must first go through culinary courses that require that I cook and bake with animal products. According to this boards def. of a vegan, that makes me not vegan. But understand that I never consume nonvegan products, I just use them, if I were to refuse to bake with them, I would simpally fell the course and the vegan pastry shop would never happen. So am I vegan? Yes. But if you want to get all picky, you can say that this 17 yr old girl living in her omni family, who bakes with and/or cooks meat, dairy, eggs, etc is not vegan; though she tries her best and never eats the products that she makes unless they are vegan. Does that make sence?

But still, I think that veganism is a process. Some day, I will master culinary skills and find the money to open up a vegan shop, and at that point i will be done with working with nonvegan ingrediants. Perhaps, the first day of your vegan diet you didn't know that casien comes from milk, and you bought some soy cheese with casien in it. A month later, you learn that casien comes from milk, so you cut it from your diet. Were you vegan for that month? Well, maybe. But now put it into terms of being vegan for years, and you find out that some random ingrediant isn't vegan, such as Isinglass, which is derived from fish and used in some wines and beers. You have worked so hard for years to be vegan, from you first month when you ate casien to this most resent state of drinking a glass of wine with isinglass in it. Are you a vegan? I would say yes. But since you just found out that you drank wine containing isinglass, you would stop drinking that wine, go to your health food store, and try to find a vegan bottle of wine instead.

Jennifer......if only all the would-be chefs were like you.....what a great world this would be!!
I just want to wish you the best of luck & I also wish there were a lot more
like you out there!!

Jennifer, I love every word you said. Very reasonable.

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Jennifer89

But understand that I never consume nonvegan products, I just use them, if I were to refuse to bake with them, I would simpally fell the course and the vegan pastry shop would never happen.

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Do you really believe that this is the case? If you believe that cookery is basically science then you'll find that most of the experiments have been done and documented previously. There's tonnes of (unimaginably large amounts of) cookery books out there written over the past 100 years to learn from. On one hand you do not gain first hand experience of cooking with death, however you get the next best thing - the combined knowledge of hundreds ("lifes to short not to learn from the mistakes of others" etc). You may even find you save time, money, effort and sanity in the process.

I approach recipe creation and adaptation as a science - the way I would chemistry. I learn about the function of animal ingredients and both apply them to hypothetical recipes and existing ones. I personally believe you'll have much more luck creating vegan xxxxx by understanding the function of ingredients in it (why where they included? which are key to it's success, which were added for asthetics and which were added for nutricianal value and won't be missed?) and reading the knowledge of others on the subject than just trying to recreate them then stumble around substituting ingredients.

The same goes for many other areas of science (some may agree, but whether this is due to political, personal or social beliefs isn't always clear), such as dissection of murdered animals at school to help teach kids about biology so they can pass exams, who have no intention of ever using that information. I'm all for learning and teaching, but there are other ways. As a vegan I'd personally have issue with supporting a vegan company that has benefited/exists off the death of animals.

I am a fanatical label reader. Shopping expeditions with me are often lengthy.
To make things easier I usually buy trusted products from ethical companies. The regular supermarkets get very little of my hard earned cash. I am always amazed at the rubbish added to foods. All those additives. I prefer to make meals from scratch and kow what I'm eating. I would hate to unwillingly consume animal products no matter how small amount, but I wouldn't expect others to be this fanatical, it's actually not that difficult though! :)

Last year I took a cooking class at my school; nearly everything we made wasn't vegan (except for a day where we were able to bring in our own recipes and I brought in a recipe off vegweb for happy vegan cookies!).
However, we worked in groups and the size of our recipe was based off of the size of the group. As I refused to work with any non-vegan ingredients, we always made our recipe smaller so that it would accommodate one less person. I'm sure you could talk to your teacher and he or she would work with you.

When I first became vegan, I read every label of products that could be vegan. I did the same when I became vegetarian eight years ago. I just went to the supermarket and did some reading. By now I know in certain supermarkets which brands or products are vegan and which should be avoided. When someone else, like my husband, is doing the grocery shopping, I can tell him the brands and the safe options. I do not care about 'may contain traces of' when milk or eggs or whatever are not listed among the other ingrediënts. This is only an indication that the product was made in a factory that also makes products containing eggs or milk - for people with allergies. When flavourings are not specified, I may or may not buy it depending on whether I suspect it to be non-vegan. Most manufacturers state it clearly if a flavouring contains milk, egg or fish. Probably for allergy sufferers, but vegans and vegetarians find this useful as well. I know some colourings are made of animals products and I never buy products containing those colourings. The things they are used in are non-vegan most of the time (candy, dairy desserts, pastry), so I can avoid them quite easily. The only thing that is hard to avoid here is vitamin D3. I do not always do that. It is added to all minarines and margarines, sometimes even in organic brands. I cannot avoid it when eating at other people's places. It is really the only concession I make when it comes to food. I once had peanut sauce at a friend's house that might have contained lactose, but I just ate it. I do not want to exhaust myself or others when it comes to micrograms or possible traces.

About making something non-vegan I can say that I will just do it when asked, for friends and family, in their kitchens. It is not my favourite job, cooking meat, but when my sister asks me to help her, I will just help her.

Mirjam

I don't think that on the whole vegans are motivated to be vigilant in order to maintain a 'holier than thou' attitude. I would suggest that it has more to do with not wanting to be caught out by corpse chompers, who seem to delight in taking an adversarial, moral absolutist stance.

I have emailed several companies asking why they feel the need to add animal products to everything or seeking clarification on ingredients. Thus far I haven't received one reply.

Jennifer I hope you took that class and open that restuarant. We need more vegan places to eat not less. Who cares how you got your learning as long as you learn your lessons. Be true to you and what you do and it won't matter what people said about you.

well i mean I would like to avoid all animal products if I can.
I don't trust processed food because sometimes they don't even tell you the whole ingredients list anyways...
but i still buy processed food time to time, like vinagers or whatever.
i don't eat fully organic, so who knows what kind of GM I am eating, maybe a mix between apple and cow?
but I still try my best to avoid all animal products. I know once they are killed they are killed no matter how little 3mg is, but I would like to struggle for a better future:D

I do get frustrated with personal hygience products, never know what those fancy chemical names mean or what they are derived from, although companies claim to be against animal testing, ingredients might not be all vegan. AND PLUS, if they were allowed to use those chemicals, they must be tested by someone else before with animals...:(

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Jennifer89

I agree that obsessing over all of the technical vegan stuff can make a person choose not to be vegan. Technically speeking, according to this boards definition of a vegan, I am not one. But I really am. Let me explain:
My goal in life is to become a vegan pastry chef, and to open up my own little vegan pastry shop. However, to get to that point I must first go through culinary courses that require that I cook and bake with animal products. According to this boards def. of a vegan, that makes me not vegan. But understand that I never consume nonvegan products, I just use them, if I were to refuse to bake with them, I would simpally fell the course and the vegan pastry shop would never happen. So am I vegan? Yes. But if you want to get all picky, you can say that this 17 yr old girl living in her omni family, who bakes with and/or cooks meat, dairy, eggs, etc is not vegan; though she tries her best and never eats the products that she makes unless they are vegan. Does that make sence?

But still, I think that veganism is a process. Some day, I will master culinary skills and find the money to open up a vegan shop, and at that point i will be done with working with nonvegan ingrediants. Perhaps, the first day of your vegan diet you didn't know that casien comes from milk, and you bought some soy cheese with casien in it. A month later, you learn that casien comes from milk, so you cut it from your diet. Were you vegan for that month? Well, maybe. But now put it into terms of being vegan for years, and you find out that some random ingrediant isn't vegan, such as Isinglass, which is derived from fish and used in some wines and beers. You have worked so hard for years to be vegan, from you first month when you ate casien to this most resent state of drinking a glass of wine with isinglass in it. Are you a vegan? I would say yes. But since you just found out that you drank wine containing isinglass, you would stop drinking that wine, go to your health food store, and try to find a vegan bottle of wine instead.

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Are seriously only 17!?!?!? I am shocked at how eloquently you express yourself. I am probably being biased but it makes sense to me someone who is so smart is also vegan at such a young age ;)



Well anyway hear us all out - FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS!! :) Best of luck! Make it happen!

Maybe, once your pastry shoppe is stable and successful, you can start a VEGAN BAKING SCHOOL and break the cycle! :)

Best wishes!

For the most part it is not an issue for me because I like to prepare my own foods from scratch. Foods that might contain, say, a few micrograms of carmine or cochineal, as opposed to an alternative with artificial red color, or natural red color from beets or whatever - I wouldn't eat any of the the choices as they all have too much salt. Or are all astonishingly expensive for a something that is just few ounces of wheats, rice, corn, or oats. Wheat flour is less than $1.00 US per pound. Why should I buy a cereal bar that is costing me $4.00 per pound, no matter what else is in it, in relatively smaller amounts?

Plus I find frozen prepared, heat-and-serve vegan meals, in addition to being astonishlingly expensive, all taste astonishlyly awful.

However there are some times when it becomes an issue. While my natural inclination is to be obsessive about avoiding every last microgram of animal matter - just for the fun of it - I try to realize that as a practical matter, I sometimes it would be better if spent the time on something else, instead of obsessing over a few micrograms of carmine, or glycerides. But again, most of, for example, those loaves of bread that contains glycerides in milligram amounts, is bread that is mushy gushy junk anyway.

I got tired of looking at labels and I didnt feel like I was being healthy enough even as a "regular" vegan. Also I wanted to reduce my impact on the earth a bit more anyways. And finally I felt a bit guilty for even eating micrograms of animal products. For all these reason I decided to go "Raw" a few weeks ago. It's made my life so much simpler. I feel better as well. And I dont have to spend time with labels or calling companies to find out info anymore. I love it :)

brad "And I dont have to spend time with labels or calling companies to find out info anymore. I love it"

You would still need to research things. For example several products are described as being "raw," but you have to research them to find out if they are really raw, that is, raw in the sense of not being cooked. In commercial parlance, sometimes "raw" is used to mean not subject to a usual standard of preparation, before being distributed and marketed. For example "raw" sugar comes from cooked sugar cane. It is called raw simply because it is subject to slightly less processing than pure white sugar. It has actually gone through 5 or 6 stages of processing, rather than 7 stages.

"Raw" cashews have, according to my understanding, a similar nomenclature problem. They are "raw" in the sense of not being subject to the normal roasting, salting, and seasoning processes, that commercially disseminated cashews normally go through. However they have been heated to over 140 degrees. You simply cannot safely eat cashews that have not first been cooked this way. Uncooked cashews will have traces of a chemical, from the material surround the cashew seed, that is severely irritating to the mucus membranes of the mouth, and so "raw" cashews are cooked to decompose this chemical.

So I think that you might not know these things unless you did an amount of research similar to the amount that people who eat cooked and prepared foods, have to do.

Soilman- Are you a self-exhausting microgram-oriented vegan? :p

I guess I should have described it a bit better. I pretty much only eat organic fruits, veggies, sprouts, some seeds, and some nuts and a handful of other things. I dont eat "raw" sugar or any packaged sugar for that matter, and i know the "raw" part of packaged sugar is for the most part is just a label gimmick from my research in becoming a "regular" vegan. At the moment I do take a vegan multi vitamin while I continue to do research and transition into the process of going raw, as i dont want to rush into anything the wrong way. I find that since I dont eat anything in a package now that the reading of labels has pretty gone to 0. You are right in the sense that I still need to do research and learn things though. I just know that the calling of the companies and reading labels is pretty much gone now.

brad " I pretty much only eat organic fruits, veggies, sprouts, some seeds, and some nuts and a handful of other things."

"I just know that the calling of the companies and reading labels is pretty much gone now."

Right. Got ya. But there are still plenty of other ways you could find, if that is what you are inclined to do, to be a "self-exhausting microgram-oriented vegan." For example you could use the time you save, by not having to read labels or call companies, by instead looking into the way farmers grow fruits, veggies, seeds, seeds for sprouting, and nuts. Farmers don't just put seeds into natural soil, wait for the plants to grow, and then harvest them. They spend an enormous amount of time and money on "amending" their soil. They cultivate not only the plants, but cultivate their soil. You could invest enormous amoutn of time and energy, finding out just how they do this, and how one farmer may do it differently, and more vegan-friendly, than another. This is more to self-exhaustion than label-reading and company-calling.

It seems to me that differences in soil cultivation techniques can have more of an impact on how much harm is done to animals, than say, differneces in sugar filtration methods, with one method of soil cultivation causing much more harm than another method. Or that there might be more of a difference than, for example, buyijng from one farmer, as compared to buying from another farmer, more of a differance than the difference between buying (1) a loaf of bread with a few micrograms of mono and di glycerides from animal sources or unidentified sources, and a (2) loaf of bread without any added mono and di glycerides.

so what thay you no longer have to read labels and call companies. Now you have to call farmers, and spy on them with telescopes and phone taps.

Plus, even if the farmers are amending their soil only with cover crops - youi still have to call the farmers who grew the seeds that the other farmer is planting, to have cover crops, or find out if the first farmer saves his own seed from last season's cover crop. If he buys seeds, you have to investigate the second farmer.

In my view, the only hope is to grow everything yourself, from seed you produced yourself, on soil having compost you produced yourself, only from matter you grew yourself.

Actually this is pretty much what I did when I had a vegan garden. At first I collected tree leaves from neighbors. Later I use only leaves from trees growing on my own land. At first I bought seed for buckwheat, oats, vetches, clovewr, alfalfa, soybeans, etc, peas used for cover, etc. Later I tried to save seeds more often, and buy fewer seeds.

I find the distinction between animal products and biproducts even more relevant.

Things that are just used because they're available in large amounts as biproducts that need to be gotten rid of aren't fueling the cycle very much. Say, something like gelatin (which I don't eat, but just for reference), which wouldn't exist if meat didn't, because it would be easily replaced by plant sourced equivalents and is only cheap because it's made from leftover bits and pieces.

The main issue of importance is to focus on eliminating the reason animals are killed in the first place- I'd even go so far as to say grams of gelatin or other biproducts are less important than micrograms of actual meat/dairy/eggs.

Although, of course, I completely agree with your argument about the micrograms too- better do as much as possible than to give it all up.


Personally, I'm pretty microgram obsessed.

Yes I suppose any kind of Vegan can end up being a gram counter, I just find it much less of a problem being "Raw" when I was a regular vegan and eating tons of packaged things, it was really hard to actually know what was in it and how it was really made. The whole process of it. Calling companies to speak with some random representative that isnt even vegan themselves often led to unanswered questions. By being "Raw" there is much less of this. I can go to my local farmers market in Palo Alto, CA and buy things that are grown within 10 miles. I can take a visit to the local farm and get a tour if I want to. This isnt something I could do when buying a packaged product 5,000 miles away. I can visit my community garden and help plant things and be involved in the process. I can and do grow my own fruits, veggies, herbs etc. I suppose if I was buying my veggies from mexio or something....then a lot more research would be required at to how they were grown. So I just feel that the gram counting has been eliminated since going "raw" and getting almost all my stuff locally and from my own garden. I feel as if a weight has been lifted off my shoulders of being almost obessed.....because before i went raw i was indeed a gram counter, a company caller, and emailer etc etc to find product info. This is just my experience.

I just make sure that the foodstuff didn't have animal products incorporated as part of the recipe or on purpose.

If my french fries don't have animal ingredients as part of their ingredients, or have tallow, or were cooked in animal fat, or had animal "flavor" added... then I'm fine. I care if the animal product is in the recipe, or in the production of the product. I don't care too much about cross-"contamination". So, I'll avoid bread that has less than 2% whey, but I won't avoid vegan burgers cooked with friends on the same grill (after a quick clean) as cow flesh burgers.

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aubergine

The chore in life is other people, not veganism per se.

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I totally agree with this, and find often that even if I am happy with my veganism and "avoid animal products to the best of my ability" there are always omnis or even vegetarians willing to try and trip you up - what are those shoes made out of etc. My SO picked up an empty packet of my crisps the other day and smirking said "oh, so these are vegan are they?" I was so annoyed that he would attack like that, trying to see me make a mistake almost. He backtracked and said he was just asking, not in any aggressive way but that's totally how it came across to me. It seems that the omnis who attack vegans for being purist and absolute then want to see us make "mistakes" and criticise us for doing anything that doesn't fit in with their idea of what we should be.

Jippia -

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About making something non-vegan I can say that I will just do it when asked, for friends and family, in their kitchens. It is not my favourite job, cooking meat, but when my sister asks me to help her, I will just help her

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I couldn't do this. I can't even buy something I know is non-vegan because I don't want to contribute to the industry by giving my money to it. I couldn't prepare something non-vegan even if I wasn't going to eat it.