“Discerning vegan” is a great phrase.  It means you have to or get to decide which forms of suffering are okay and which aren’t, in a basically arbitrary way.  Your computer, ipod, and other e-toys were all probably made using child and/or slave labor.

@Kelly
I think we’re all “discerning” on some level though.  Whenever you take a moral stand on something there are probably going to be nearly unavoidable things that will in some way violate your ethical standards.
 
Even the most compassionate among us in this country have to resort to products made under less than ideal conditions, or that were the result of unjust wars, or live on land stolen from indigenous people, and so on and so on.  We’ve all got blood on our hands from one thing or another and from my understanding of it, vegans are simply trying to have *less* blood on their hands rather than claiming they’re free of any taint.
 
There’s no empirical way to measure suffering, so I think that all classification of suffering is arbitrary.  Certain things matter more to some people, and it varies on a case by case basis.   I’m just  glad to see people taking steps to reduce the perceived suffering in the world.
 
 
 
 
 

Ingredients in Twizzlers (from the package I’m staring at right now):
Corn Syrup , Flour , Sugar , Cornstarch , Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil 2% or Less , Salt 2% or Less , Artificial Flavorings 2% or Less , Citric Acid 2% or Less , Potassium Sorbate 2% or Less - a Preservative , Artificial Coloring 2% or Less - Includes Red 40
Ingredients in Oreos (from Nabisco’s website):
<span id=“EProductInfo_ProductInfoPanel1_lblIngredients” class=“product_info_panel_ingredients”>SUGAR, ENRICHED FLOUR (WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMINE MONONITRATE {VITAMIN B1}, RIBOFLAVIN {VITAMIN B2}, FOLIC ACID), HIGH OLEIC CANOLA OIL AND/OR PALM OIL AND/OR CANOLA OIL, AND/OR SOYBEAN OIL, COCOA (PROCESSED WITH ALKALI), HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, CORNSTARCH, LEAVENING (BAKING SODA AND/OR CALCIUM PHOSPHATE), SALT, SOY LECITHIN (EMULSIFIER), VANILLIN - AN ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, CHOCOLATE. CONTAINS: WHEAT, SOY.</span>
 
—-Are we to assume the sugar used to make Twizzlers and Oreos is not bleached “using the charred bones of animals”?
 

The Mock Duck at Thara Thai is divine.

So since both Oreos and Twizzlers list HF corn syrup and sugar separately, we could assume these snacks food aren’t quite vegan?
 
Just wonderin’!

Jason,
No Doubt.  I know that if you look too deeply into lots of things, you might not like what you see.  But “veganism”—as it’s presented here—seems just to look into a mirror.  So the problem here, for instance, with sugar turns out to be that its refinement with animal byproducts might mess with the arbitrary identity vegans have chosen and the ecological and economic impacts of sugar plantations on the world.  It’s narcissism and not ethics.  Plus Twizzlers.

oops: I meant “...and not ecological and economic impacts…”

@Kelly
Though it may seem illogical, there are people whose primary concern is the presence of animal products, and the rest of the impacts from the production of their food is secondary.  I understand your point about the bigger picture of the ecological and economic impacts of the sugar industry, but my perspective on the matter isn’t at question here. 
 
I do think there’s an ethical reason to avoid certain processed sugars and that it isn’t simply narcissism to do so.  People seem to avoid any number of dietary boogeymen (animal products, pork, high fructose corn syrup, non-organic food) for a variety of reasons, not all of which I understand or agree with.  Still, I’d be very reluctant to discount somebody’s dietary choices.  It’s an extension of my belief that our bodies are our own, and we should be free to use (or misuse) them as we each see fit.

Emma:
As I said in my first response to your question, beet sugar is often used as well. Since those two very cheap products are made using an unspecified form of sugar and HFCS, I would say it’s safe to assume beet sugar is used. Also, I’ve looked this up for verification from many different sources, such as VegNews and the PETA website, and my guess is that those are reliable sources. Unfortunately, I haven’t watched Oreos or Twizzler’s being made so I am not absolutely, 100% sure. Have you considered contacting the manufacturers to ask them to specify what form of sugar they use?

Kelly:
It seems to me like you saw the word “vegan” and pounced on this article as an example of what you think is an inherently flawed ideology. However, this article is not a full-blown polemic claiming that veganism is the only way for people to save the world. This article is merely a list of surprising items that are and are not vegan.

Also, I find it rather disheartening for you to describe vegans as narcissists with only one concern, which is not eating animal products (and purely for our sake, not because of any legitimate reasons). Like every other vegan I know, I am indeed concerned about the ecological and economic impacts of sugar plantations. We do try to eat local, sustainable food, and we don’t always stuff our faces with Twizzlers just because we can, because we recognize that there are other problematic aspects to such products. The vegans I know also tend to participate actively in other struggles for equity and justice—must we wear all of those concerns on our sleeve every time we say something related to veganism, just to avoid the charge of “narcissism”? The reason why I don’t say all of that in the article is because it’s tangential, and I didn’t think people would be so offended by this article that I would have to explain myself and my “identity” before them.

This article is a satire, right?  Mushrooms grown in animal dung is not vegan? Yeah, gotta be a satire.
HFC is vegan. That’s nice. Oh, brother! Talk about fucked up priorities.
Where’s Anthony Bourdain when you need him.  Need to watch that episode with the Inuit, where they do him the honor of offering him the best part of the raw seal feast, the eyeball.  Anthony doesn’t bat an eye (as it were), chews it up and calls it quite delicious.  The guy is a Mensch! 
I knew some of the people involved in the early days of the Utne Reader in Minneapolis, who were a little miffed when Christopher Hitchens (love him or hate him, or both) called it the Journal of Post-Industrial Self-Regard.  Hadn’t thought of that it years, but it was a dead-on bulls-eye.
 

This article is about vegans and sugar and Twizzlers.  It’s not about all the other great things people who eat strict vegetarian diets do or don’t.

@Millie and Kelly
Kelly also wrote:
It’s not about all the other great things people who eat strict vegetarian diets do or don’t.
 
Which makes me wonder why she also included her initial reference to child and slave labor.  I’m not trying to be difficult here, but it seems disingenuous to try to expand the discussion to include a wider variety of issues, only to declare those discussions off-topic when people post replies.

I didn’t mean to kick off the sugar/candy/cookie rant. I’m enlightened by the info about sugar. I bake vegan (or, so I thought). I’ve fed Alexx, who wrote this great article, vegan (I thought) baked goods I prepared. Alexx, my apologies for my ignorance about the stuff—everything else IS strictly vegan, promise! :)

Sorry guys.  I won’t criticize your lifestyle choice again.

A diatribe against vegans. Those of a delicate sensibility may be excused.
For about 7 or 8 years I lived with an obnoxious vegetarian who made meal times miserable in her ridiculous demands for a special diet.<span>  </span>Fortunately she finally graduated high school and got the hell out of the household.<span>  </span>I loved her anyway (and still do).
I admit to having little respect (which is not the same as toleration) for religiosity and it’s dietary rules of purification and submission, and that includes the sacred cows of Kashrut, Halal and the rest. I can garner some respect for the moral reasons, and have great respect for political reasons to check out of the mainstream food system.<span>  </span>But when you talk about HFCS and Twizzlers—grow the fuck up.<span>  </span>This looks like a conceit of adolescent girls, tracking parallel to bulimia; like some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder. And when you start talking about “strictness,” you are in purification-ville, and no good ever came of that.
We need to put this free society, personal choice shibboleth to rest, too. Yes, you can, as a free individual say and do and eat whatever you want.<span>  </span>You can also be assailed for being a dope, despite your expectations that you get a free pass by making incantations about personal freedom.<span>  </span>But this is trivial compared to the idea that by being a vegan you have some sort of positive social effect. Get over the deluded notion of individual choice as having any sort of real effect on food production systems, and take it for what it is, a hearty pat on the back from yourself.
So, vegans, what parts of life are valuable to you?<span>  </span>You’re worried about bone char, an industrial product from the industrial meat system.<span>  </span>You think not eating sugar makes a drop’s worth of difference—that if this use were not there, fewer animals would be slaughtered?<span>  </span>If so, you are delusional, and destructive of real efforts to transform the food system and the environmental nightmare it creates.<span>  </span>The industrial food system, and particularly the meat sector, is monstrous.<span>  </span>It’s a holy horror; an abomination in the eyes of the Lord, not to mention the more important humanity that suffers from this system.<span>  </span>
Your little personal ego-enhancing stance of purity—a right-minded stance of good old-fashioned American individualism, which you apparently imagine is either, a) morally purifying, or b) resistant to the system, is about as significant as another fly on a cow’s flank in a feeder yard.<span>  </span>Changing this system will require a social and political movement, not a bunch of dilettante consumers refusing to eat white sugar (which is not to say that eating less sugar is a bad thing).
Look at HFCS. It’s a major part of the industrial mix that makes corn production viable at its current destructive level.<span>  </span>That corn production means huge amounts of industrial petrochemicals, the pesticides monoculture requires, millions of barrels of diesel fuel, the inexorable washing of the greatest endowment we’ve ever known or will ever know, the soil, into the Gulf of Mexico, and the KILLING of all life in the soil by fertilizer and pesticide applications.<span> </span>But hey, HFCS is Vegan, so what could be wrong?
You don’t want to eat meat, that’s fine.<span>  </span>If you do like meat, buy it from a local organic farmer and eat far less of it.<span>  </span>Yeah, it’s expensive in terms of cash outlay compared to Meijers or Wal-Mart, but it’s actually the real cost, not the taxpayer subsidized cost of industrial meat.<span> </span>
If you want to do the vegan thing, including Twizzlers, fine.<span>  </span>You are free to do so as a freeborn taxpayer/consumer.<span>  </span>Just don’t expect me to respect it.<span>  </span>The stakes are too high for this kind of foolishness.
As to that obnoxious veggie of several years ago: Well she fell off the wagon.<span>  </span>Hard. Yesterday she went with Larbo of Thislittlepiggy.com fame to a slaughterhouse to pick up a whole pig.<span>  </span>Still, she’s also a food radical when it comes to industrial production and is going to be a force in the movement to make this a far healthier planet.
<span>So for those vegans out there, I love you too.  But you are not part of the solution.</span>

Stuart, et al.
 
Nobody is asking you to respect anything. 
 
Alexx wrote an article that I might venture to say was aimed at vegans or people genuinely interested in a vegan lifestyle.  It is strange to me that you’d go out of your way to criticize someone for discussing several of the more interesting facets of their personal lifestyle choice.
 
You may see this as being a silly distraction from some greater human drama, and you certainly have the right to do so (heck, I might even be inclined to agree with a few of those points) but do you have to be mean about it?
 
Just sayin’.
 
JP,
 
Nice point.  Its interesting to see who takes Link Cards in this town.  For the longest time it was only super markets and convenience stores, but nowadays you have smaller vendors like Strawberry Fields who provide some real alternatives. 
 
Still, the idea that we choose what we eat (most all of us in the Western world, that is) is an incredible thought all by itslef.

@Stuart
It seems to me like you’ve got a double standard for different forms of food activism.  
 
I’m not sure what being a “food radical” entails, but how is it that your daughter’s individual decisions mean that she’ll be “a force in the movement” while a vegan’s individual decision makes them “not part of the solution”?  I’d be willing to bet that the food radical handbook and the vegan handbook share a lot of similar concepts, goals, and practices, but that’s just a guess. 
 
I think you’re wrong in your assessment that people need to"Get over the deluded notion of individual choice as having any sort of real effect on food production systems”.  You could make the same cynical argument about nearly any cause.  Individual votes don’t really matter because an election is never decided by a single vote, objecting to wars is pointless because one man won’t stop an army, trying to stop a local road construction project is futile because nobody really cares about local politics, etc, etc, etc…  The people who have changed this world for the better have never let long odds intimidate them.
 
I agree that a widespread movement is needed to build the momentum to change the system, however, what is a movement besides a series of individuals making choices that align with each other?  Every movement starts somewhere, it’s not like one day five million people wake up and decide that civil rights are a good idea.
 
Again, if individual choices make no difference, how is it you hold your daughter’s choice to be a food radical in such high regard, yet have such disdain for vegans?  
 
You’re free to think whatever you want about the merits of veganism, it just bothers me when people make arguments that appear inconsistent (to me, at least).  

I can’t believe you didn’t find the revelation that beeswax comes from bees informative.

I’m starting to think that SP shouldn’t publish any more “vegan” articles.  They all start too much controversy and bickering, making the SP staff & writers look like a bunch of in-fighting knuckleheads, except for Stuart who seems to be making some good, if cynical, points about the futility of the vegan lifestyle as a means of influencing positive change in the world.
 
And since I’m always a fact-checker, one of the first claims in the article is wrong.  Dr. Bronner’s does “use certified organic beeswax in the lip and body balms.”  You’ll need to look elsewhere for a vegan alternative.  If you’re not stuck in the vegan lifestyle (or don’t need their balms), I would otherwise highly recommend their products.
http://www.drbronner.com/faqs_main.html

@Jason
 
I agree with Millie that controversy (even amongst SP’s stable of writers) is a good thing.  The last thing I want from my media outlets is an echo chamber or groupthink.  
 
People are going to dislike certain topics without considering the substance of or arguments that are made in the articles.  In those cases, I think this image sums things up well.  

Jason and everyone else,
I apologize for the error in the first item. I know the current owner of the Dr. Bronner’s Company and he mistakenly told me that the lip balm/tattoo balm was vegan and because of his position, I didn’t think to fact check that item. However, the rest of the items were fact checked.
Here are some other vegan alternatives: Literati Vegan Lip Balm, Eco Lips Bee Free, and Merry Hempsters.
Again, I apologize for that error.

Alexx - I appreciate your response, and I’m glad to hear that you did do your research.  I liked your writing and I look forward to future articles from you.

Mille, Jason -
I fully support SP publishing articles that I disagree with and/or are of no use to me.  My issue is that the “vegan” articles, beyond anything else in the food section, have stirred up the worst/silliest arguments and/or worst fact-checking around.  Arguments and discussion are one thing—keep it up!  Name calling and the still-pointless “if you don’t like it, don’t read it” argument only serve to make SP, it’s writers, readers, and editors look bad. 

@Jason —
 
Why would we not publish these kinds of articles? It seems to me that, no matter the kind of language being used, or the tones being used — by both writers and readers — people are learning. I know that I am. Certainly, it helps when research is fully realized, but even when it isn’t, that doesn’t fully discredit its worth. After all, lots of this is just a matter of opinion, and all the research in the world wouldn’t make a bit of difference.
 
Certainly, what good is this magazine without some good old fashioned knock-down drag out comments to spice up the articles themselves?
 
Looking forward to your next article, Jason.
 
{*taps foot, looks at watch*}