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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

Also, gelatin is considered vegetarian by some, or at least there are some vegetarians that don't realize that gelatin is an animal product (just some sort of "mystery" ingredient, I guess).

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For those who are wondering if there are alternative to animal gelatin, Japanese have been using agar [1] (they call it kanten) for centuries to prepare sweets. It's similar to gelatin, but made from algae, so it is absolutely vegetarian. As far as I know all Japanese traditional sweets that require something gelatinous are made with it, so they are safe to it if you are vegetarian/vegan.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agar

Wow, I didn't realise that agar the same products used in science experiments/testing was also the food thing (wiki lists uses as microbiology and culinary) . I recall the smell of the agar used in the lab to be very strong and quite off putting if thought of as a food. Has your experience of the aroma of culinary agar been positive?

The agar used in labs generally has a lot of other (potentially smelly) stuff put in it, depending on what kind of microorganisms you're trying to grow.

Pure agar is odorless and tasteless.

This can become an issue for religious vegetarians, too. In India when you say that something is vegetarian it contains no gelatin or animal fat or anything like that. Vegetarian food is prepared separately.

Orthodox Hindus who move to the West often struggle with this. Even ice cream (marked as vegetarian) sometimes has gelatin. You can ask for vegan food, which is an approximation, but "no milk" is the antithesis of many Indian diets :)

I know such families who basically never eat out ever, and prepare things from scratch at home. Though they usually are more lax on allowing the kids to eat pseudo-vegetarian food.

Where is ice cream marked as vegetarian? I have never seen a label. I also never saw gelatin as a listed ingredient in ice cream

Not all ice creams, some of them. When I say marked I mean in general if you ask the store; doesn't need to be actually marked (though some foods are marked this way, even if they contain gelatin)

I've had ice cream where they specifically included gelatine as one of the ingredients. Also, some gelatos contain gelatine as well.

Going by wiki, I believe there are non-animal sources or substitutes to gelatin "Partial, nonanimal alternatives to gelatin include the seaweed extracts agar and carrageenan, as well as pectin and konjac.".

There are substitutes. I'm not arguing that. I'm saying that many people will see gelatin itself as vegetarian or as some sort of "mystery" ingredient that they don't really know the source of. I didn't know the source of gelatin until I was iat university, for example.

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