Since the vegetarians and vegans can still figure out the meat options contain meat I think it's more of a do not emphasize rather than withhold the information.
The reason those labels are there is to facilitate us being able to find what we can eat. I don't want to look over 30 menu items before I can find the 3 things I can eat. Same reason they mark "gluten free", "nut free", "low carb", etc.
Yes, I have on occasion accidentally received meat in a dish that wasn't explicitly listed. Sometimes it's a result of me not being familiar enough with the food and sometimes they just don't bother to mention e.g. the salad comes with chicken on top.
Many years ago I was surprised at “vegetarian” refried beans sitting beside “traditional” on the grocery. Turns out, traditionally, they contain pork fat. Not immediately obvious unless you’re raised making them yourself.
But then it gets into the ridiculous where white sugar is used. It's white by filtering it with bone char. At that point it's a religion more than a diet.
Oreos are vegan, and are the best selling cookies in the US. Thin Mints are vegan too, and as I understand it, they're pretty popular. Graham crackers are often vegan, and those are the base for basically every homemade cheesecake. Obviously the rest of the cheesecake isn't likely to be vegan, but it seems the crackers aren't enough to ruin it with their crappy taste or texture.
"The results suggest removing vegetarian and vegan labels from menus could help guide US consumers towards reduced consumption of animal products."
The menu items would need to be descriptive about the ingredients used for someone who is actually vegetarian or vegan to know if the ingredients used truly is or not then.
I also get that these kinds of meals are generally cooked alongside or on cooking materials that may have come into contact with meat, but I haven't found a vegan/vegetarian friend that has been sensitive to that detail (unless it explicitly states it's cooked on grills and pans that had meat on them).
> The menu items would need to be descriptive about the ingredients used for someone who is actually vegetarian or vegan to know if the ingredients used truly is or not then.
“this study did not find that vegetarians and vegans were more likely to choose items with meat when the labels were removed, indicating that removing labels did not negatively impact them.”
Of course, the quote doesn’t address the stricter requirements of vegans vs. vegetarians.
Just because vegans and vegetarians were able to find the food eventually doesn't mean they weren't negatively impacted. It's a huge pain in the ass to find the 2 items I can eat on your 30 item menu without labels. Maybe a separate menu would be appropriate if we want to move away from labeling.
It also doesn’t address the fact that vegetarians and vegans will spend more time making sure they don’t accidentally eat something that doesn’t fit with their dietary choice, but that trawling through every ingredient for every menu item is a huge faff that’s avoided by simply labelling vegetarians and vegan items clearly.
It feels like the argument of “removing labelling will result in more consumers choosing vegetarian and vegan options” relies on, ultimately, tricking the consumer. That can’t be a good proposition to start from.
Negative encounters with vegan meals in regular restaurants or with inexperienced cooks can shape attitudes toward the term "vegan." Unappetizing taste experiences may lead to associations with blandness, while poorly balanced nutrition can raise concerns about sustainability and health. Additionally, frustration with limited food options in social settings or restaurants may result in perceptions of "vegan" as inconvenient and restrictive.
> I also get that these kinds of meals are generally cooked alongside or on cooking materials that may have come into contact with meat, but I haven't found a vegan/vegetarian friend that has been sensitive to that detail
Vegans come in all shapes and sizes, and although I don't care too much about contamination, veggies smelling like bacon would be very unappealing. I wouldn't visit such a restaurant twice.
Blatantly labeling a food item with anything other than flavor and nutritional value probably causes it to be seen by people as not being competitive on flavor or nutritional value.
Perhaps the lesson is to be careful of vegan foods that require labels in the first place. Most of the healthiest food are so obviously vegan that it would be absurd to label them, as is the case with legumes, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. It isn't until you move up the processing ladder that these labels become necessary. Once you've entered the realm of food that's been engineered to imitate animal products, that vegan label is doing a lot of work to make people think of the food as healthy.
I would hypothesise that a nutritional label like "high fibre" or "low salt" might well have the same dissuading effect. A follow-up study is called for!
Other labels that might have a similar effect are religious ones like kosher or halal.
I recently discovered a lactose-free sort of cheese in Germany that had only a small label on the rear side of the package (other brands in this segment usually make it very clear to simplify the discovery by lactose-intolerant people). My guess is their marketing team already knew the effect and wanted to sell it to broader audience. I won’t be surprised if „Eco“ and „Bio“ labels have „overpriced“ or similar negative perception for the audience not too concerned with their original meaning, but the discoverability for the target audience matters more for most of the products.
If I see something labelled vegan I immediately think it's going to taste worse. I don't think that about vegetarian food necessarily. But when I see it labelled that way on a menu it does go through my head that this food is on the menu for reasons other than its flavor.
>this food is on the menu for reasons other than its flavor.
Sure and this is ok. The same with the salad, right? And the mineral water on the drinks list.
Like you, I support the genuinely necessary efforts for providing good access to alternatives to animal protein.
Edit :
I think the replies are misunderstanding. I'm saying, the vegan food is not for you. It's for vegans, like the salad is for those eating light. Like the mineral water is for those who don't want an alcoholic drink. Why do you care how it tastes? Please, can we keep it on the menu.
I've been 3 decades advocating and celebrating more diversity in menus and it would be devastating to see losses from what has been achieved.
Next step what so many are asking here: make it taste good
But the mineral water and the salad don’t necessarily need to be labeled as vegetarian.
I think the issue is that people don’t interpret the ‘vegetarian’ label on the menu as “this is OK for vegetarians to eat”, they interpret it as “we altered this dish to make it suitable for vegetarians”, and usually the latter means it’s not very good.
I don't think he implied otherwise. It was an opinion in reference to the study, which I agree with. If I'm at the store and grab a random snack off the shelf to try, I'll pretty much always put it back if the label says vegan because I've been burned by overpriced vegan snacks that taste like garbage so many times.
I also like when something is labeled gluten-free, but it’s something that’s normally gluten-free. Instead of enticing me to it, it puts me off. Glutens are delicious.
This can legit get pretty silly, but having heard celiac friends' horror stories about getting gluten'd from unexpected sources I'm definitely inclined to understand the "better safe than sorry" approach here. An explicit gluten-free option is always going to be the better choice for anyone in that camp, especially when the consequences of picking wrong can be pretty damn unpleasant.
I just commented above similar story. But it's not better safe than sorry. As a friend of mine said it's become a joke everything is "gluten free" but it's not known if it actually is.
It just seems instead of eating baked goods that taste like sandpaper people should be eating rice or quinoa or corn or teff or millet. Some people just can't seem to get past sandwiches and pastries but if you get past that there is a lot of great stuff to eat that is naturally gluten free... But no, they have to have a gluten free BLT or a gluten free donut.
Yeah it's frustrating to see gluten free pushed as healthy to people who don't have celiac disease. It's about 1% of the US population or 3.3 million out of 339 million. Epilepsy affects about 1.1% of the population for comparison.
Anecdotally I knew two people with the disease and can see it's frustrating to live with. One person told me how pepper the cheap stuff in restaurants or grocery stores has wheat dust in it to help it flow. A co-worker told me of the frustration his sister had in restaurants with trendy "oh it's gluten free" but it wasn't so off to the hospital she went. He said she was more mad at how everything is labelled as gluten free now but there's no way to really know since it's mainly just a cash grab.
gluten free pushed as healthy to people who don't have celiac disease.
Studies are finding that gluten tolerance isn't binary. There are many people who don't have celiac and can in principle eat gluten safely, but still find digesting gluten an uncomfortable experience due to how it reacts with their gut.
It's funny because this is the opposite of my experience. The vegan dishes tend to be spiced better and come with a better variety of vegetables/flavours.
But I'm also curious to ask: what would you assume about a vegan restaurant?
I forgot the name of it but I've been to that famous mexican vegan restaurant in the sf mission and the food was excellent and yeah, my expectation of the food from it is different than what I would expect from a non-vegan restaurant.
My expectation from most restaurants serving vegan food is that they are just trying to have something so that vegan people technically can eat there but not necessarily that they will enjoy it.
Your expectation matches my general experience. I only eat those vegan options, and I rarely enjoy them. It’s not because vegan food can’t be good or because I don’t like vegan food; the restaurants and the people working them simply don’t care to make those options shine like other dishes.
It’s not always true. It’s a safe guideline though. I’d say 4/5 cases it’s fair to expect the vegan menu option to be mediocre at best.
This varies by locale too, though. It’s a little easier to find okay options in places with more vegan restaurants in general.
I guess locale is a big part of it. I'm maybe spoiled in the Netherlands where quite a lot of people limit their meat intake and vegan options are plentiful.
I'm not sure why my comment above deserved all the downvotes though, I was only sharing my own experience and asking a question.
My default opinion of "vegan" items in menus of non-vegan restaurants is that they seem suspicious and are best avoided (I'm not talking about salads, of course). I tend to assume they are second rate meals put in the menu as an option for vegans who are there to dine with non-vegan friends.
I have been proven wrong on occasion, as some restaurants do offer decent options for vegans without specializing in it, but as a default intuition it seems more often right than wrong.
Vegan restaurants on the contrary can be quite good (again, with exceptions: just as there are bad steak houses or Italian restaurants, so there are bad vegan restaurants!). You just know the vegan items aren't an afterthought because every item is vegan.
In my experience vegan food tend to mostly belong to a single food culture with its own blend of spices, taste and textures. It is as different to meat based food cultures as Indian food culture is to the food culture in Greenland.
A typical vegan dish when I see it presented at a restaurant or conference is usually one that is primarily based on beans, chickpeas, lentils, and Couscous, usually with minimal spices. On the side there is usually several dips, often variations of Hummus.
There are exceptions. If I see a vegan dish in a Thai restaurant I would assume a different taste and culture, hopefully one based primarily on seaweed and mushrooms.
As a picky eater who's not very fond of most vegetables, for most of my life I thought it would be impossible for me to enjoy vegetarian or vegan food just because whenever I'd seen some vegan options available somewhere they were just like what you described. Eventually it turned out that there are many more options out there than what you get when a meat-based restaurant needs to come up with some non-meat dish to not lose some orders and that if you find places where people know what they're doing you can easily discover vegan dishes that you find on par or even preferable to their meaty alternatives merely because of their taste and texture. Turns out there's a variety of "sub-cultures" there, but if you don't actively look for them all you get to see is bland mainstream filled with vegetables that I used to pick out from my plate as a child.
There are basically two groups of vegetarian/vegan food: those dishes that simply happen to not contain any meat (or animal products in case of vegan) and dishes that traditionally do contain meat/animal products, but where it was replaced with something else to make the dish veg(an|etarian).
I have no problem with the former group, those are usually just things that taste great. For the second group, it’s often something where the original tastes great but they ruined it by taking out the meat. I avoid those.
If something is labeled as vegan or vegetarian I’m going to assume it’s in the second group.
You might want to reconsider. East and South-East Asia have been developing and using meat substitutes for at least several decades, if not centuries: they are based on soya, konjac, flour, mushroom fibres, etc, and they taste phenomenal. They may not precisely resemble the meat that they look like (there's mock mutton, mock shrimp, mock chicken, mock sausages, mock ham, mock duck, mock pork ribs, mock pretty much anything), but the texture, aroma, and taste are superb, and they work well both stir-fried, or as proteins in stews/gravies/curries.
I think the Western effort to imitate meat is less likely to be successful than the already-existing Asian mock-meats industry: in the West, it seems people want their imitations to look exactly like meat, with all the blood and fat and everything, which is going to be significantly more expensive and taste a lot worse than something that merely resembles meat visually and letting the taste and texture be different.
Exactly. These days I even prefer some of the mock meats (especially seitan); not because they imitate meat so well (they don't), but because I often find their taste and texture nicer and more consistent than that of real meat.
which was one of the best tasting snacks there is, but as they went upscale it became larger and more expensive and more elaborate.
It reminds me of the Sandtaler which was a simple shortbread cookie (not vegan!) in the bakeries of Dresden in 1999, if I travelled in West Germany I would find cookies that were complications of the Sandtaler such as two Sandtalers stuck together with chocolate, but the simple cookie was too cheap for richer parts of Germany.
Did they literally write Vegan or Vegetarian, perhaps as the first word on the menu item? Or did they put a little green V or VG at the end of the item? I can't tell based on the abstract.
Edit: looked into it further. It appears they did write "vegan" in parentheses at the end. I wonder if they had been more subtle about it if the results would be as pronounced.
> Reducing consumption of animal products is a critically important challenge in efforts to mitigate the climate crisis. Despite this, meals containing animal products are often presented as the default versus more environmentally sustainable vegetarian or vegan options.
This told me everything I needed to know about the authors' beliefs. While I don't appreciate this position, I do appreciate their honesty. Kudos to them for that.
I think it's the fact that they're only vegan because of consequences, not because they have a moral opposition to harming animals, which is what veganism is supposed to be about.
The global scientific consensus is that climate change is primarily caused by humans burning fossil fuels. Fossil fuel use is what put more green house gases into the atmosphere, which in turn is heating the earth beyond what the environment can handle.
How critical different strategies are to combating climate change has a significant weaker consensus. Energy productions and energy usage is usually the most critical in mitigating climate change. Diet is fairly debated subject, with some researchers listing it higher on the list while others listing it much lower.
Agriculture is often combined with land use, but the deeper one go into this subject the more difficult things get. A "wet" forest is several times better than a dry forest, so in terms of combating climate change, removing water draining can be more effective than increasing the amount of land dedicated to forestation. There are many factors for policy makers and a lot of low hanging fruit that is more critical to target first.
I was not wrong to say that the statement quoted from the paper is in-line with scientific consensus. Your assessment of how some rank their lists doesn't make the statement wrong. Most scientists who look at the numbers agree that animal agriculture needs to be addressed to help combat climate change.
I think the point here is that animals raised for meat should not be conflated with burning fossil fuels. Cattle, chickens etc. are part of the carbon cycle.
Modern high-intensity farming practices such as feedlots and cage chickens - where the majority of the feed is grain and harvested hay - are probably where the conflation enters. There is just as much a need to raise healthy, minimally carbon intensive animals as there is to reduce eating meat. There are farming methods to do this, but change is slow.
Not sure why you're talking about 'conflating with burning fossil fuels'. I didn't do that and neither did the paper. It seems like you're not read up on the topic.
Staggering amounts of methane and nitrous oxide. Massive deforestation and other habitat loss (read: reduction of carbon sinks).
When people appeal to authority it is important to include context which fully describe the view and perspective of said authority so that the information is not just correct, but given in context so that it is not misleading.
When scientists discuss diet in terms of global warming, part of that discussion include fair wages, ethnic discrimination, inequality, land ownership, ethnic heritage and culture, biodiversity and many other similar topics. All those influence how animal agriculture effects climate change. The global consensus is however very weak the further one goes from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels impact on global warming is an established fact in the global scientific community, as well as the requirement to stop burning fossil fuels. Inequality is also a fairly establish contributor to global warming by itself, but the exact solutions does not have a strong consensus.
You keep bringing up things that are completely beside the point. The scientists who wrote the paper weren't talking about wages, ethnic discrimination, etc. Why are you muddying the topic? Why are you pretending that scientists haven't made arguments about the very real impact of animal agriculture on climate change that are rooted in greenhouse gass emissions?
Have you not heard of the copious amounts of methane and nitrous oxide associated with animal agriculture? Have you not heard of the associated deforestation and other habitat loss that results in more atmospheric carbon?
I used to be a chef. It's really easy to level a bunch of value judgements at people on topics like this, but the truth is, food marketing is complicated, and none of us is as rational about our choices as we might imagine.
Putting aside the appeal of the terms vegetarian and vegan, which is what most comments here seem to focus on, there are other factors. I reckon the most important one is in-groups and out-groups. As soon as you label something as being "for someone," it subtly implies that it not for someone else.
The small Boston-area fast casual chain Clover did a really good job of side-stepping that. Their menu was ovo-lacto vegetarian with lots of vegan options, but they simply didn't market themselves as such. In turn, they were generally seen as a restaurant for everybody that served plant-based foods rather than a restaurant for people who eat plant-based diets. There are things that kind of annoy me about Clover that I won't get into here, and I'm not a vegetarian, but I do really admire what they did there.
I agree with you, but nitpick/warning about Clover specifically: I would not say they have "lots of" vegan options; last time I went they had two vegan sandwiches, one of which is on the "secret menu" -- except for the time when they swapped out the vegan mayo on it for a dairy mayo without telling anyone because of supply issues. They've also been actively hostile toward vegans on social media and even in-store media (they briefly had a "vegan wall of shame" at their DTX location) -- their owner is petty as they come. If you are looking for vegan food in Boston there are so many better options -- I would recommend literally anywhere else.
My preferred example of non-exclusive labeling in the Boston area is Red White Boneless Ramen in Back Bay. Their store and menu are devoid of any mention of "vegan", "vegetarian", or "plant-based" (beside the recent addition of "Boneless" to their branding) but they are 100% vegan (and crazy delicious).
Most people understand dairy products to mean things made from or containing milk.
There’s a pretty close association between such products and eggs, so I can understand why people might try to use the same label.
But ultimately I think this is just causing confusion and pointless side discussions (like this one!), so it would probably be better if we dropped it.
I disagree. Particularly in the "vegan versus vegetarian" debate, it's widely understood that what separates the former from the latter is milk and eggs.
And in this context specifically, it should be evident that regular mayonnaise isn't vegan, since vegans don't eat animal products. Which includes eggs!
That doesn't mean that dairy is the singular word to refer to the difference between vegans and vegetarians. Dairy is widely understood to mean solely milk products. Vegetarian is vegan + dairy + eggs. Use a different word for dairy + eggs.
> The attributive dairy describes milk-based products, derivatives and processes, and the animals and workers involved in their production, for example dairyman, dairymaid, dairy cattle or dairy goat. A dairy farm produces milk and a dairy factory processes it into a variety of dairy products. These establishments constitute the global dairy industry, part of the food industry.
It's certainly a geographical, if not entirely US quirk to conflate eggs and dairy products. (As an aside, butter fat doesn't really emulsify into mayonnaise, sadly, but hollandaise is always nice.) It's not a formal status or anything— it's chiefly used among laypeople or in communications targeting them, and not among people who eat kosher, etc— but it is very common.
Why? US eggs are stored, shipped, and sold refrigerated. For logistical simplicity, they're usually kept in the refrigerated dairy section of our grocery stores. We do that because our eggs have their natural coatings washed off and they are given a light (pretty much imperceptible) coating of mineral oil. While that does slightly reduce the liklihood of contact cross-contamination from our filthy poultry supply chain, it makes them more susceptible to spoilage— though they're generally fine for extended periods at room temp as long as they stay dry... but restaurant health inspectors sure as hell wouldn't tolerate it. (Some people actually immerse them in mineral oil to preserve them for much longer, though I have no clue what the comparative time to spoilage would be.) Last I checked, there was a 1 in 10k chance of an egg having enough salmonella (et al) to sicken a healthy adult if eaten raw, but the FDA went on the offensive at some point in the 70s or 80s admonishing people not to eat eggs that weren't fully cooked, eg. with runny yolks, so now diners that sell bazillion "over easy" runny fried eggs, and even some bars that make you any sort of flip or other cocktail with egg whites, legally has to put a disclaimer on the menu saying that it might cause foodborne illness.
You can always get cartons of egg whites, and less frequently, whole shell eggs that were pasteurized slowly enough for them to maintain the physical properties of raw eggs without the slight pathogenic risk— very handy feeding or serving egg drinks to more suseptible folks, such as the elderly, immunocompromised, or children.
Side note: I very much love pasteurized carton eggs. Pre-separated, no guessing the size ("my recipe wants 3 medium eggs, i only have large, do I use 2.54?") and peace of mind when making stuff like fresh mayonaise.
Home made mayo made from US eggs is not safe unless enough acidity is used and the mayo stands at room temperature long enough before consumption--because the pasturization does not kill salmonella inside the egg.
Indeed, US shell eggs aren't pasteurized unless they're sold as such, and few are. Also, our chickens aren't usually innoculated against (or preemptively treated with antibiotics) for salmonella, etc. as they are in some places (which is generally why US water-chilled chickens have something like a 1 in 4 chance of having enough salmonella to sicken you, yet you can eat raw chicken as confidently as you can raw beef in some countries— it's not because their poultry industry is cleaner or some other BS folk explanation.) And while the acid usually stops it from reproducing, there's not a snowball's chance in hell you're making mayo acidic enough to actually kill it, and that stuff can survive for months in wet environments.
That said, I've made mayonnaise with unpasteurized US shell eggs literally thousands of times, tasting every time, and eaten it at restaurants hundreds of times. What anyone considers "safe" is relative. Fine dining restaurants across the globe sell millions of portions of it per day, as they do beef tartare, carpaccio, sashimi, French style buttercream and meringue, raw oysters, clams, flip cocktails, and zillions of other 'unsafe' things. US restaurants must sell tens of millions of runny-yolk eggs, and millions of Hamburgers not brought to 145 degrees internally.
They don't do so entirely without incident, but it's well within many people's risk tolerance threshold. Surveillance for outbreaks of serious strains (eg Salmonella Heidelberg, E. Coli OH157, etc) is pretty good— people usually seek medical treatment when the serious symptoms start, most GPs and emergency medicine practiciners are pretty good at knowing when they need to test, and epidemiologists do follow up before they even hit the requisite 3 cases to be considered an outbreak.
I think a solution that I would prefer as a vegan and that wouldn't impact others is for the main menu to say at the bottom "ask for our vegan/vegetarian menu" so that for me it's easier to pick things, and no one else needs to see the labels. It also might invite the restaurants to provide more vegan options and potentially include some (without labeling) in the main menu.
looked for this in the article, since it seemed such an obvious thing to test for but they haven't (yet).
Vegan and vegetarian can mean both the menu and the people following that diet, "plant based" is clearly only about the menu, may suggest "healthy", and may not evoke negative sentiments.
"""
Also, while the present work studies the impact of "vegetarian" and "vegan" labels, other terms used to indicate that foods lack animal products, such as "plant-based", have become increasingly common. Do "plant-based" labels also have a negative impact on consumers' choices? How does their effect compare to "vegetarian" and "vegan" labels? The present work could be extended to help answer these questions, as well as study how different labels positively or negatively impact the choices of different consumer groups.
"""
"The results suggest removing vegetarian and vegan labels from menus could help guide US consumers towards reduced consumption of animal products."
In Europe it is very common to see menus with iconography for fish, plants, grains, and cheese to quickly identify diet friendly items. To me, as a meat eater with a pescatarian girlfriend, it makes the menu seem much more friendly and inclusive. And from my anecdotal experience as a US citizen in Los Angeles who spends a lot of time in Europe, they are much more vegetarian friendly over there.
Maybe removing labels isn't the answer, maybe adding more is.
I'm proud to see a study supporting the hypothesis that I have long been proposing when going out for a meal with friends! In fact I explained it not long ago on HN [0].
I received some cheese in a food kit that was labelled as Vegetarian, but I misread it as Vegan so I didn’t bother eating it (I’ve had bad experiences with vegan cheese in the past).
I’d not seen cheese labelled vegetarian before which is probably what threw me off, but I didn’t even think that the rennet in cheese comes from cow stomachs, so having a vegetarian alternative to the rennet makes sense.
After realising my mistake I tried the vegetarian cheese the next time it showed up, and it tasted indistinguishable from other ‘normal’ cheese I’d had in the past.
My misreading and prejudice against what I thought was vegan cheese would have stopped me buying something that I liked. If it wasn’t marked as vegetarian I wouldn’t have even thought twice about eating it.
Instead of labeling "vegan" or "vegetarian", maybe label them as "contains no meat or dairy" and "contains no meat" respectively...? I dunno, as a vegetarian, I would love to be able to tell at glance if something is vegetarian or not.
Anecdote: traveling in eastern California (near Sonora), I went into a store where they had these ginormous home-made Mexican cookies. Me gusta!! I asked for one, and was interrupted by the wife: she asked the owner (of the store) if she could confirm that they were vegetarian. The owner went to the back room, found the packing slip and whoops! One of the ingredients was manteca (or lard, or beef tallow). Apparently it's common to use it in Mexican food, so she wanted to confirm.
Had the cookies had standard indicator of vegetarianism (a green circle in a green square, like this: https://images.app.goo.gl/ggPD5vEgFzwXjP2o7) I wouldn't have wasted their time.
> a large field experiment in a chain of UK cafes found that modifying dish names away from names that highlighted that they were meat-free had a significant positive effect on sales (Bacon et al., 2018)
They did a questionnaire based on a hypothetical menu. There can be bias based on the types of restaurants people tend to go to.
If a restaurant primarily has meat dishes but they have one or two vegan options so token vegans can eat there, it's probably an afterthought. Some of the worst vegan food I've ever had was at steakhouses. Thay should surprise nobody.
If someone who took the questionnaire primarily eats at places that primarily serve meat-focused dishes, they probably have a view of vegan food that's very different from the reality of what most vegans actually eat on a regular basis.
The experience in India is markedly different, given just how many people are vegetarian there (for a ballpark figure: at any mealtime, about 1/3 the Indian population, or about 500 million people, eats a fully-vegetarian meal). Restaurants and chains proudly advertise that they only serve 'pure vegetarian' food, and people—even not-vegetarian people—flock to them in droves anyway.
Western veg(etari)an labelling has motifs of leaves, or plants, etc. Indian labels are a lot more subtle and abstract: a green dot in a green square for lacto-vegetarian, and a red/brown triangle in a red/brown square for non-lacto-vegetarian (ergo, egg products are in this group)[1]. The Indian labelling is also mandatory, so all food packaging and every menu item in Indian restaurants has to be accompanied by a green or red icon (this however leads to some mildly funny things like 'chicken tikka masala powder' being itself vegetarian, but the dish that it is used in being non-vegetarian).
I think this whole disdain for vegetarian labelling is entirely because vegetarian food has got a terrible rep in the West. This is likely due to poor experience in cooking vegetables (no one likes steamed broccoli), to narrow restaurant options, to simply not being exposed to other cuisines besides American, French, and English.
I've already given Indian cuisine as the gold standard for delicious vegetarian food; other alternatives (that may not necessarily be traditionally entirely vegetarian) include Indonesian, Tibetan, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Mexican, and Italian.
Final addendum: every study on vegan/vegetarian food should include a subsection or two containing a case study on India.
Treat animal products like you treat allergens. Many restaurants have a table of allergens, they usually include things like "eggs", "milk" and "fish", just add an "animal products" line, maybe also more specifically "meat" (for vegetarians) and "pork" (for religious reasons).
I can't stand people who conflate veganism with vegetarianism. Veganism is about morals and values and being a good person. Has nothing to do with diet or health.
There's not a huge vegan market in India but vegetarianism is a huge thing. To differentiate between vegetarian and non vegetarian food there are different colored symbols [0] that explain whether food is vegetarian or not. Avoids the big label but anyone who wants to know can easily identify it.
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So, yes.
The menu items would need to be descriptive about the ingredients used for someone who is actually vegetarian or vegan to know if the ingredients used truly is or not then.
I also get that these kinds of meals are generally cooked alongside or on cooking materials that may have come into contact with meat, but I haven't found a vegan/vegetarian friend that has been sensitive to that detail (unless it explicitly states it's cooked on grills and pans that had meat on them).
“this study did not find that vegetarians and vegans were more likely to choose items with meat when the labels were removed, indicating that removing labels did not negatively impact them.”
Of course, the quote doesn’t address the stricter requirements of vegans vs. vegetarians.
It feels like the argument of “removing labelling will result in more consumers choosing vegetarian and vegan options” relies on, ultimately, tricking the consumer. That can’t be a good proposition to start from.
> I also get that these kinds of meals are generally cooked alongside or on cooking materials that may have come into contact with meat, but I haven't found a vegan/vegetarian friend that has been sensitive to that detail
Vegans come in all shapes and sizes, and although I don't care too much about contamination, veggies smelling like bacon would be very unappealing. I wouldn't visit such a restaurant twice.
Other labels that might have a similar effect are religious ones like kosher or halal.
Sure and this is ok. The same with the salad, right? And the mineral water on the drinks list.
Like you, I support the genuinely necessary efforts for providing good access to alternatives to animal protein.
Edit :
I think the replies are misunderstanding. I'm saying, the vegan food is not for you. It's for vegans, like the salad is for those eating light. Like the mineral water is for those who don't want an alcoholic drink. Why do you care how it tastes? Please, can we keep it on the menu.
I've been 3 decades advocating and celebrating more diversity in menus and it would be devastating to see losses from what has been achieved.
Next step what so many are asking here: make it taste good
I think the issue is that people don’t interpret the ‘vegetarian’ label on the menu as “this is OK for vegetarians to eat”, they interpret it as “we altered this dish to make it suitable for vegetarians”, and usually the latter means it’s not very good.
Salad is not at all like an animal-based meal having its animal component replaced with something else.
Likewise, mineral water is there because some people like drinking water and not alcohol or soda.
That's what your taste buds say but if your immune system ever decides to weigh in on this you might find yourself rethinking the matter.
Yeah no shit … reminds me of ye olde xkcd about asbestos-free cereal: https://xkcd.com/641/
It just seems instead of eating baked goods that taste like sandpaper people should be eating rice or quinoa or corn or teff or millet. Some people just can't seem to get past sandwiches and pastries but if you get past that there is a lot of great stuff to eat that is naturally gluten free... But no, they have to have a gluten free BLT or a gluten free donut.
Anecdotally I knew two people with the disease and can see it's frustrating to live with. One person told me how pepper the cheap stuff in restaurants or grocery stores has wheat dust in it to help it flow. A co-worker told me of the frustration his sister had in restaurants with trendy "oh it's gluten free" but it wasn't so off to the hospital she went. He said she was more mad at how everything is labelled as gluten free now but there's no way to really know since it's mainly just a cash grab.
Studies are finding that gluten tolerance isn't binary. There are many people who don't have celiac and can in principle eat gluten safely, but still find digesting gluten an uncomfortable experience due to how it reacts with their gut.
But I'm also curious to ask: what would you assume about a vegan restaurant?
My expectation from most restaurants serving vegan food is that they are just trying to have something so that vegan people technically can eat there but not necessarily that they will enjoy it.
It’s not always true. It’s a safe guideline though. I’d say 4/5 cases it’s fair to expect the vegan menu option to be mediocre at best.
This varies by locale too, though. It’s a little easier to find okay options in places with more vegan restaurants in general.
I'm not sure why my comment above deserved all the downvotes though, I was only sharing my own experience and asking a question.
My default opinion of "vegan" items in menus of non-vegan restaurants is that they seem suspicious and are best avoided (I'm not talking about salads, of course). I tend to assume they are second rate meals put in the menu as an option for vegans who are there to dine with non-vegan friends.
I have been proven wrong on occasion, as some restaurants do offer decent options for vegans without specializing in it, but as a default intuition it seems more often right than wrong.
Vegan restaurants on the contrary can be quite good (again, with exceptions: just as there are bad steak houses or Italian restaurants, so there are bad vegan restaurants!). You just know the vegan items aren't an afterthought because every item is vegan.
A typical vegan dish when I see it presented at a restaurant or conference is usually one that is primarily based on beans, chickpeas, lentils, and Couscous, usually with minimal spices. On the side there is usually several dips, often variations of Hummus.
There are exceptions. If I see a vegan dish in a Thai restaurant I would assume a different taste and culture, hopefully one based primarily on seaweed and mushrooms.
I have no problem with the former group, those are usually just things that taste great. For the second group, it’s often something where the original tastes great but they ruined it by taking out the meat. I avoid those.
If something is labeled as vegan or vegetarian I’m going to assume it’s in the second group.
You might want to reconsider. East and South-East Asia have been developing and using meat substitutes for at least several decades, if not centuries: they are based on soya, konjac, flour, mushroom fibres, etc, and they taste phenomenal. They may not precisely resemble the meat that they look like (there's mock mutton, mock shrimp, mock chicken, mock sausages, mock ham, mock duck, mock pork ribs, mock pretty much anything), but the texture, aroma, and taste are superb, and they work well both stir-fried, or as proteins in stews/gravies/curries.
I think the Western effort to imitate meat is less likely to be successful than the already-existing Asian mock-meats industry: in the West, it seems people want their imitations to look exactly like meat, with all the blood and fat and everything, which is going to be significantly more expensive and taste a lot worse than something that merely resembles meat visually and letting the taste and texture be different.
Consider the options here[1], for instance.
[1]: https://www.friendlyvegetarian.com.sg/
https://traditionalplantbasedcooking.com/vintage-chocolate-v...
which was one of the best tasting snacks there is, but as they went upscale it became larger and more expensive and more elaborate.
It reminds me of the Sandtaler which was a simple shortbread cookie (not vegan!) in the bakeries of Dresden in 1999, if I travelled in West Germany I would find cookies that were complications of the Sandtaler such as two Sandtalers stuck together with chocolate, but the simple cookie was too cheap for richer parts of Germany.
Edit: looked into it further. It appears they did write "vegan" in parentheses at the end. I wonder if they had been more subtle about it if the results would be as pronounced.
This told me everything I needed to know about the authors' beliefs. While I don't appreciate this position, I do appreciate their honesty. Kudos to them for that.
I don’t see anything to do with opinion or personal preference of the author in the quoted statement, hence my question.
How critical different strategies are to combating climate change has a significant weaker consensus. Energy productions and energy usage is usually the most critical in mitigating climate change. Diet is fairly debated subject, with some researchers listing it higher on the list while others listing it much lower.
Agriculture is often combined with land use, but the deeper one go into this subject the more difficult things get. A "wet" forest is several times better than a dry forest, so in terms of combating climate change, removing water draining can be more effective than increasing the amount of land dedicated to forestation. There are many factors for policy makers and a lot of low hanging fruit that is more critical to target first.
Modern high-intensity farming practices such as feedlots and cage chickens - where the majority of the feed is grain and harvested hay - are probably where the conflation enters. There is just as much a need to raise healthy, minimally carbon intensive animals as there is to reduce eating meat. There are farming methods to do this, but change is slow.
Staggering amounts of methane and nitrous oxide. Massive deforestation and other habitat loss (read: reduction of carbon sinks).
When scientists discuss diet in terms of global warming, part of that discussion include fair wages, ethnic discrimination, inequality, land ownership, ethnic heritage and culture, biodiversity and many other similar topics. All those influence how animal agriculture effects climate change. The global consensus is however very weak the further one goes from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels impact on global warming is an established fact in the global scientific community, as well as the requirement to stop burning fossil fuels. Inequality is also a fairly establish contributor to global warming by itself, but the exact solutions does not have a strong consensus.
Have you not heard of the copious amounts of methane and nitrous oxide associated with animal agriculture? Have you not heard of the associated deforestation and other habitat loss that results in more atmospheric carbon?
Putting aside the appeal of the terms vegetarian and vegan, which is what most comments here seem to focus on, there are other factors. I reckon the most important one is in-groups and out-groups. As soon as you label something as being "for someone," it subtly implies that it not for someone else.
The small Boston-area fast casual chain Clover did a really good job of side-stepping that. Their menu was ovo-lacto vegetarian with lots of vegan options, but they simply didn't market themselves as such. In turn, they were generally seen as a restaurant for everybody that served plant-based foods rather than a restaurant for people who eat plant-based diets. There are things that kind of annoy me about Clover that I won't get into here, and I'm not a vegetarian, but I do really admire what they did there.
My preferred example of non-exclusive labeling in the Boston area is Red White Boneless Ramen in Back Bay. Their store and menu are devoid of any mention of "vegan", "vegetarian", or "plant-based" (beside the recent addition of "Boneless" to their branding) but they are 100% vegan (and crazy delicious).
There’s a pretty close association between such products and eggs, so I can understand why people might try to use the same label.
But ultimately I think this is just causing confusion and pointless side discussions (like this one!), so it would probably be better if we dropped it.
And in this context specifically, it should be evident that regular mayonnaise isn't vegan, since vegans don't eat animal products. Which includes eggs!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy
Why? US eggs are stored, shipped, and sold refrigerated. For logistical simplicity, they're usually kept in the refrigerated dairy section of our grocery stores. We do that because our eggs have their natural coatings washed off and they are given a light (pretty much imperceptible) coating of mineral oil. While that does slightly reduce the liklihood of contact cross-contamination from our filthy poultry supply chain, it makes them more susceptible to spoilage— though they're generally fine for extended periods at room temp as long as they stay dry... but restaurant health inspectors sure as hell wouldn't tolerate it. (Some people actually immerse them in mineral oil to preserve them for much longer, though I have no clue what the comparative time to spoilage would be.) Last I checked, there was a 1 in 10k chance of an egg having enough salmonella (et al) to sicken a healthy adult if eaten raw, but the FDA went on the offensive at some point in the 70s or 80s admonishing people not to eat eggs that weren't fully cooked, eg. with runny yolks, so now diners that sell bazillion "over easy" runny fried eggs, and even some bars that make you any sort of flip or other cocktail with egg whites, legally has to put a disclaimer on the menu saying that it might cause foodborne illness.
You can always get cartons of egg whites, and less frequently, whole shell eggs that were pasteurized slowly enough for them to maintain the physical properties of raw eggs without the slight pathogenic risk— very handy feeding or serving egg drinks to more suseptible folks, such as the elderly, immunocompromised, or children.
Side note: I very much love pasteurized carton eggs. Pre-separated, no guessing the size ("my recipe wants 3 medium eggs, i only have large, do I use 2.54?") and peace of mind when making stuff like fresh mayonaise.
"*Pasteurized eggs have been heated to a high enough temperature for a long enough time to kill Salmonella."
Only 3 percent of the eggs sold in the US are pasturized though and if you make mayo with ordinary eggs, salmonella is a possibility.
That said, I've made mayonnaise with unpasteurized US shell eggs literally thousands of times, tasting every time, and eaten it at restaurants hundreds of times. What anyone considers "safe" is relative. Fine dining restaurants across the globe sell millions of portions of it per day, as they do beef tartare, carpaccio, sashimi, French style buttercream and meringue, raw oysters, clams, flip cocktails, and zillions of other 'unsafe' things. US restaurants must sell tens of millions of runny-yolk eggs, and millions of Hamburgers not brought to 145 degrees internally.
They don't do so entirely without incident, but it's well within many people's risk tolerance threshold. Surveillance for outbreaks of serious strains (eg Salmonella Heidelberg, E. Coli OH157, etc) is pretty good— people usually seek medical treatment when the serious symptoms start, most GPs and emergency medicine practiciners are pretty good at knowing when they need to test, and epidemiologists do follow up before they even hit the requisite 3 cases to be considered an outbreak.
Vegan and vegetarian can mean both the menu and the people following that diet, "plant based" is clearly only about the menu, may suggest "healthy", and may not evoke negative sentiments.
""" Also, while the present work studies the impact of "vegetarian" and "vegan" labels, other terms used to indicate that foods lack animal products, such as "plant-based", have become increasingly common. Do "plant-based" labels also have a negative impact on consumers' choices? How does their effect compare to "vegetarian" and "vegan" labels? The present work could be extended to help answer these questions, as well as study how different labels positively or negatively impact the choices of different consumer groups. """
In Europe it is very common to see menus with iconography for fish, plants, grains, and cheese to quickly identify diet friendly items. To me, as a meat eater with a pescatarian girlfriend, it makes the menu seem much more friendly and inclusive. And from my anecdotal experience as a US citizen in Los Angeles who spends a lot of time in Europe, they are much more vegetarian friendly over there.
Maybe removing labels isn't the answer, maybe adding more is.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37094223
I’d not seen cheese labelled vegetarian before which is probably what threw me off, but I didn’t even think that the rennet in cheese comes from cow stomachs, so having a vegetarian alternative to the rennet makes sense.
After realising my mistake I tried the vegetarian cheese the next time it showed up, and it tasted indistinguishable from other ‘normal’ cheese I’d had in the past.
My misreading and prejudice against what I thought was vegan cheese would have stopped me buying something that I liked. If it wasn’t marked as vegetarian I wouldn’t have even thought twice about eating it.
Anecdote: traveling in eastern California (near Sonora), I went into a store where they had these ginormous home-made Mexican cookies. Me gusta!! I asked for one, and was interrupted by the wife: she asked the owner (of the store) if she could confirm that they were vegetarian. The owner went to the back room, found the packing slip and whoops! One of the ingredients was manteca (or lard, or beef tallow). Apparently it's common to use it in Mexican food, so she wanted to confirm.
Had the cookies had standard indicator of vegetarianism (a green circle in a green square, like this: https://images.app.goo.gl/ggPD5vEgFzwXjP2o7) I wouldn't have wasted their time.
I wonder if they listed Linda Bacon first for comedic value: https://www.wri.org/research/language-sustainable-diets-fiel...
If a restaurant primarily has meat dishes but they have one or two vegan options so token vegans can eat there, it's probably an afterthought. Some of the worst vegan food I've ever had was at steakhouses. Thay should surprise nobody.
If someone who took the questionnaire primarily eats at places that primarily serve meat-focused dishes, they probably have a view of vegan food that's very different from the reality of what most vegans actually eat on a regular basis.
Western veg(etari)an labelling has motifs of leaves, or plants, etc. Indian labels are a lot more subtle and abstract: a green dot in a green square for lacto-vegetarian, and a red/brown triangle in a red/brown square for non-lacto-vegetarian (ergo, egg products are in this group)[1]. The Indian labelling is also mandatory, so all food packaging and every menu item in Indian restaurants has to be accompanied by a green or red icon (this however leads to some mildly funny things like 'chicken tikka masala powder' being itself vegetarian, but the dish that it is used in being non-vegetarian).
I think this whole disdain for vegetarian labelling is entirely because vegetarian food has got a terrible rep in the West. This is likely due to poor experience in cooking vegetables (no one likes steamed broccoli), to narrow restaurant options, to simply not being exposed to other cuisines besides American, French, and English.
I've already given Indian cuisine as the gold standard for delicious vegetarian food; other alternatives (that may not necessarily be traditionally entirely vegetarian) include Indonesian, Tibetan, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Mexican, and Italian.
Final addendum: every study on vegan/vegetarian food should include a subsection or two containing a case study on India.
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/FSSAI_ne...
Treat animal products like you treat allergens. Many restaurants have a table of allergens, they usually include things like "eggs", "milk" and "fish", just add an "animal products" line, maybe also more specifically "meat" (for vegetarians) and "pork" (for religious reasons).
Also, vegetarianism is also commonly a moral choice.
There's not a huge vegan market in India but vegetarianism is a huge thing. To differentiate between vegetarian and non vegetarian food there are different colored symbols [0] that explain whether food is vegetarian or not. Avoids the big label but anyone who wants to know can easily identify it.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FSSAI_new_labels_for_ve...