First Vegan Thoughts

The first thing to be aware of with a vegan diet is that a surprising amount of junk food is vegan. Not cheese doodles or milk chocolate, obviously. However, most corn chips and salsa are vegan, kettle corn and caramel corn often are vegan, 99.9% of potato chips are vegan… you get the idea. Manufacturers of prepackaged snacks avoid dairy for cost reasons, so pita and pretzel chips, many crackers and other simple carbohydrate goodies are all "safe" for vegans. That doesn't translate to weight loss.

Obvious non-vegan junk foods? Milk chocolate, most commercial baked goods, and a shocking number of vegetarian products. I thought I was pretty safe with Amy's Soy Cheese Pizza but I failed to notice the warning that milk protein was used to make the soy cheese. It all depends how scrupulous you are about your definition of vegan. Later this week I will discuss the controversy over honey, which may or may not be vegan depending on which vegan you ask.

Things I wish I hadn't figured out because they tempt me:

Whole Foods non-dairy walnut baklava (yes, it has honey in it) is to DIE for. I'm seriously considering making a pan of baklava later this week just to get precise nutrition information.

Dark chocolate? Often vegan. One example would be this Signature Dark Chocolate Mint Bar from the vegan-friendly Lake Champlain Chocolates. A search for "vegan" on the site produces a whopping 39 results. The dark chocolate mint bar has mint flavored sugar crystals that crunch and I've found one square (55 calories) to be extremely satisfying.

How to get started:

Go to Whole Foods or your local hippie Mecca and ask the first person you see who works there about vegan products. I tried this and it turned out I was talking to a vegan with 6 years of experience. I'll give more details later, but I was tickled by that incident and had to share.