Posts Tagged ‘vegan’

VeganWiki

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

I’ve found myself spending increasing amounts of time standing in a supermarket with one can of beans in each hand wondering if I could save 55 cents by purchasing the one that contains sdaeajasdfdea, or if sdaeajasdfdea is an animal product. While being able to search the Internet from my phone is enormously helpful (seriously, how did I ever function without the Internet in my pocket?), some of these queries aren’t answered on the first page of results. In an effort to not continually be tracking down the same n ingredients every time I go shopping, I decided to start a wiki to record my findings named, for lack of a more clever moniker, VeganWiki.

I spent some time deliberating about this, because there’s already so much reference material on the Internet, I seriously questioned the need for adding more. But I didn’t find any one good resource on the matter, and some sites that seemed promising at a glance often contained errors or had a different ideas about what foods they consider vegan, making it worse than useless to me. While I hope others can benefit from this resource, the problem I was trying to solve was uniquely mine: I didn’t trust the other resources, and I don’t expect random strangers who come across this one will trust it much more.

I hope that, in spite of that, the collaborative nature of a wiki, in conjunction with judicious citations, will make it a resource useful to someone other than just me. It’s kind of a ghost town right now, but I hope you will consider adding your distinctiveness knowledge to its own.

At long last: vegan white chocolate

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

I’m in Prague. I’ve been trolling all the local health food stores for fancy vegan things I take for granted in the United States. One exciting find was vegan white chocolate. This was huge: I have been looking for vegan white chocolate for years and I have never found it. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the cash to purchase it on that occasion. It was Saturday, so the store closed early and stayed closed until Monday.

After two days of anticipation, I returned to purchase the chocolate bar. As I walked away, I ate a piece. I was not pleased. I thought maybe I was just off my rocker, so I made plans to ask my friend and host, Lindsey, her opinion.

When she arrived home several hours later, she confessed that she’s not so into white chocolate. I replied that this particular bar wasn’t my favorite either, but I wanted to hear her assessment. She agreed to humor me.

As she slowly chewed it, she was very diplomatic about expressing her distaste, but none of her comments were hit the nail on the head. Finally I asked her directly if there was any specific taste it reminded her of. She paused for a moment, “Vomit?”

Apparently the whole time she was chewing it, she was like, “Don’t say vomit, don’t say vomit,” whereas I was mentally screaming, “It tastes like puke! Say it tastes like puke!”

Lindsey described her mental image of a chocolate factory, where they make a bar of chocolate, then everybody stands around and tastes it, and they all decide whether or not it’s good enough to be sold. Apparently somebody ate this puke-flavored chocolate, and was like, “Yes, this is good. Let’s market this.”

Update! Sept 18 2009 – Bonvita Rice Milk White Bar FTW! I’m not sure if I’d be so enthusiastic had its predecessor not set the bar so low (“Please taste better than vomit”), but right now I think it’s about the best white chocolate I’ve ever had.