I developed a little sarcastic voice in my head that says “no whey” every time I find the smidge of dairy

I swear they just put milk powder in stuff for fun sometimes. There's no way it's actually that important to the flavor of a BBQ chip.

When they make cheese, the more solid curds are separated from the more liquid whey. The harder the cheese, the more whey was pulled out. There is lots and lots of cheese made around the world, so there's lots and lots of whey created, and so it's a relatively cheap substance to get ahold of. Dried out, it's usually called "milk solids" (though that phrase can be used for other forms of dried out milk)

So yeah, it gets added to all sorts of things to make them taste milkier or sweeter. The thing is, the lactose in milk mostly ends up in the whey, not in the curds, so this really messes up people who are lactose intolerant. Lots of things end up having a high lactose content that you wouldn't normally expect to. Someone told me that KitKat bars have lots of it, though I haven't verified that.

i’m disabled and i have a lot of food allergies / sensitivities. my insurance is trying to have me get home delivered meals i can just microwave when im not well enough to do anything else.

i’m allergic to soy and coconut… the meal company has almost nothing i can eat. like maybe 3 meals.

the hamburger - not a veggie burger, actual meat - contains soy. the meat patty… contains soy. not “may contain,” actual soy protein is an ingredient of the meat patty alongside the meat.

the mac and cheese contains coconut… it’s not vegan mac and cheese. but it contains coconut

like why do they do this. do not the unnecessary ingredients

I appreciate the new "CONTAINS:" labeling requirement in the US.

Just yesterday I was in a health food store examining the ingredient list on a bag of popcorn.

"Natural butter flavoring." No source listed, hmm...

Allergen alert, "Processed on equipment used by dairy." Okay, that's not a dealbreaker.

But the thing that made me put the bag back on the shelf was the fact that other products by that brand (which I can't recall the name of right now) made notes on the packaging when they were vegan. The one I was looking at just said "gluten-free." I figure that if the company wants to put little symbols showing when things are gluten-free, allergen-free, vegan, etc., they probably would do so with everything that fits the criteria, right? To appeal to more customers? The fact that it didn't specifically say it was vegan, even though other products did, made me suspicious.

I'm in the US, our laws concerning labeling the source of food additives suck. I can't imagine why the company would've omitted explicitly saying the product was vegan if that was the case, so I erred on the side of caution. I ended up getting Hippeas and Vegan Rob's puffs instead.

Lol I wasn't just reading a label that said "may contain milk"

I don't understand industrial food production

Things have gotten so much better in the the last 25 years (I've been vegan). The worst used to be long roadtrips. I remember I couldn't buy anything in the truckstops. Even roasted peanuts had goddamned gelatin in them!

Somebody's about to get Scott Pilgrimed

When I tried be vegan (for about a decade), I never managed to give up ghee.