Negative impact of vegetarian and vegan labels
doi.org
doi.org
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Other labels that might have a similar effect are religious ones like kosher or halal.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
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...
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?
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. """
Also, vegetarianism is also commonly a moral choice.
No.
So, yes.