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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem here is that "vegan" is used to describe two different things:

1. A product that has been changed to not use any animal products.

2. A product that already fits within those constraints.

Products in the former group have a history of being noticeably worse than their non-vegan counterpart, so "vegan" carries the stigma of "tastes worse than it looks". That stigma then wafts over to products in the second category.

Other categories of products are more careful to use distinct terms. That's why you see things labelled "naturally fat-free" instead of just "fat-free", for example.

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I think there's room for a third category, "things that need to be changed inconsequentially". Many recipes have egg or gelatine in them for functional purposes; usually as "glue" to hold things together, like in pancakes, where you aren't including the eggs for their flavour. You can easily replace them with vegan alternatives like ground flax. As a bonus it is usually cheaper and as dry ingredients they keep forever.

Btw the liquid in a can of garbanzo beans works great as a plant derived eeg replacement.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquafaba

That's a great point. I wonder if there's an elegant/clean way to denote that something is vegan but not changed to be vegan. "Naturally fat-free" is good, and the sort of plant logo that some restaurants use at least avoid the word "vegan" which may help.

> I wonder if there's an elegant/clean way to denote that something is vegan but not changed to be vegan.

Naturally free of animal products?

"naturally vegan" seems most appropriate, no?

Sometimes plant-based is used as a more socially acceptable word for "vegan". I think there's also a difference between titling a product "vegan" and specifying that it is vegan. "Vegan donuts" isn't as appealing to non-vegans as "Donuts (vegan)". Likewise I'd be discouraged to get something labeled "Gluten free cookies", but if I saw "Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (gluten-free)" I wouldn't hold it against them.

On a related note: When I was vegan, I said I exclusively ate things made from plants. It was better received and understood. Also I would antagonize friends by giving them vegan pb&js, vegan pickles, vegan French fries, vegan Coke, etc.

No mushrooms or fermented products for you?

(I know you were just trying to give people a simplified model.)

Are you just giving random examples or is regular Coke not vegan?

Regular coke is about as vegan as regular pickles.

Pretty terrible analogy. I have no idea if pickles are vegan or not. I would assume they are but I'm not steeped in the vegan ethos and many things have surprised me in the past as being non-vegan.

Animal products are constantly snuck into processed, preserved and packaged foods. I'd find it funny, but wouldn't be surprised, to find that something derived from an animal found its way into a jar of pickles 'for flavor'.

Interestingly, if it's 'throwback' coke with white/processed sugar in it, it's NOT vegan, as animal products (mostly bone/etc.) are used in the production of that sugar. HFCS modern coke is generally considered vegan.

Vegan french fries is the stand out here. Many commercially available ones are flavored and/or cooked with non-vegan ingredients.

"Low carbon"?

Labeling products with "natural" has resulted in 40 billion in food sales for times with that have the label. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/06/24/the-w...

It is purely marketing.

>Other categories of products are more careful to use distinct terms. That's why you see things labelled "naturally fat-free" instead of just "fat-free", for example.

Are you sure marketing didn't just want to include another buzz word to attract sales? 90% of the food that got labeled fat-free 10 years ago (Before fat was good again...) was always fat free.

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