Really, the disqualification is probably better publicity than winning the award itself. If someone told me some vegan cheese won a “Good Food” award, I would assume it was related to eco- and social-consciousness. Learning that it was so delicious that the dairy industry schemed to take away the award tells me they’re afraid of the competition.
When Seiko beat the Swiss at their own mechanical watch accuracy competitions, they decided to cancel the long running prestigious competition entirely instead of make a better watch.
Capitalism breeds innovation!
Same with Japanese Scotch whiskeys absolutely running the table on ones from Scotland in competitions.
Let me see if I get this right: they get disqualified for containing an ingredient that hasn’t been certified as edible (kokum butter) and is usually used in cosmetics, and there is no evidence of Big Cheese being the reason for the disqualification, other than the owner of the company saying it.
But it is still Big Cheese’ fault?
It’s even worse than that. The makers aren’t even sure what was in their product to begin with.
Zahn says the kokum butter shouldn’t be an issue anyway: The company has since replaced it with cocoa butter, which does have GRAS certification. Initially, he told the Post the cocoa butter version was what he submitted for the awards, but after this story was published he said he determined that it was in fact the kokum butter version. (According to Weiner, Climax submitted an ingredient list that included kokum.)
So it might have been labeled with having kokum butter, it might not. Who knows? Seems to depends what answer is needed at the time.
Also,
Climax, it turns out, wasn’t just a finalist — it was set to win the award, a fact that all parties are asked to keep confidential until the official ceremony in Portland, Ore., but was revealed in an email the foundation sent to Climax in January.
If I’m reading this correctly, out of all the contestants, only they knew they won. Makes it a further stretch that it was a dairy company that “out” them as they wouldn’t have known that the vegan cheese won.
My guess for the change about GRAS was it most likely was assumed everyone would only submit GRAS items, and since someone broke that non-spoken rule then they had to make it a clarified rule. It is something you’d just assume everyone made sure their food was most or less FDA approved (which is a logical assumption).
The Washington Post article is much clearer about this whole issue (which is linked to in this badly written Boingbonk article.)
“Our cheese is so good they had to disqualify us” would be my new slogan so fast.
I’m surprised, I’ve had all sorts of vegan cheeses and they all taste like murder
The point of vegan cheese is that they most certainly do not taste like murder. 😁
thats like saying that the point of buying non nestle water is so that it doesnt taste like nestle water. (yes they all taste a little different, i mostly attribute that to secondary factors though)
Also you can make cheese without murdering cows im pretty sure?
also weird off topic question, im curious about this. But would consuming breast milk as a child be considered non vegan? I realize at this point it doesn’t really matter since you have no autonomy as a person, but i’m curious about the ethics in application to humans.
A baby human consuming their mother’s breast milk is vegan, because the mother is consenting to it. A cow cannot consent to being forcibly, artificially impregnated for the sake of producing milk. They don’t consent to having their horns chopped off. Nor do they consent to their children being stolen from them almost immediately after birth to be butchered for veal.
Yes plant-based cheeses are intended to mimic animal cheeses. But that doesn’t mean they have to be identical. Guilt puts a tint on the things we experience, and the way we feel can be considered a dimension of flavor. I would imagine a lot of people would argue they don’t feel guilty about consuming animals or their secretions, but that’s only because they’ve never experienced any time without that guilt. If you’re used to feeling a certain way every day, you start to forget about the feeling all together, even though it’s still effecting you in the background.
The idea with plant-based alternatives is to have all of the good properties of their animal-counterparts, and none of the bad. Cheese that’s free of the shame and guilt of causing unnecessary harm and suffering to thinking, feeling, sentient beings inherently tastes better.
A baby human consuming their mother’s breast milk is vegan, because the mother is consenting to it. A cow cannot consent to being forcibly, artificially impregnated for the sake of producing milk. They don’t consent to having their horns chopped off. Nor do they consent to their children being stolen from them almost immediately after birth to be butchered for veal.
i suppose that makes sense, so hypothetically if we solved all of those problems, it would be vegan? That sounds about right to me. And if it’s consent based, then what if the mother is forced to bear a child for example, surely that would no longer be vegan?
Yes plant-based cheeses are intended to mimic animal cheeses. But that doesn’t mean they have to be identical.
Yeah, but then you should probably not name it, or base it directly off of an existing cheese, in which case, fine by me. Don’t pull up with some shit that is explicitly not “blue cheese” and then call it “blue cheese” though. That’s just lying.
The idea with plant-based alternatives is to have all of the good properties of their animal-counterparts, and none of the bad. Cheese that’s free of the shame and guilt of causing unnecessary harm and suffering to thinking, feeling, sentient beings inherently tastes better.
i mean, i guess so, but then at that point we start getting into philosophy and nihilistic shit starts to crop up. But any improvement is a potential improvement i suppose. It’s incredibly hard, if not impossible, to live a truly “net zero” lifestyle. Even monks don’t do it, and they don’t do shit.
Only replying to your last point, and on that I only have to say that perfection is the enemy of greatness. The vegan philosophy is about doing the best we can, within practical limits. I can’t stop myself from breathing or my mere existence causing harm to beings I can’t even see, but doing more feasible actions like abstaining from animal consumption and electing not to purchase or use other animal products has substantial benefits that are felt.
yeah that’s fair enough. But then again it is called veganism for a reason. I suppose i would probably rather it be called something more broad, if it’s actually less about the actual consumption, and more about the morals and technicalities of how things work.
I do think the name itself is problematic. To anyone unfamiliar to the ideas, the word hints at something to do with vegetables, and yes that currently plays a role, but it’s not the point. It’s more of an animal rights milieu, and plants are only relevant at this point in time because it’s the least harmful way humans can sustain themselves for now. But that ignores that animal rights go far beyond diet, and that fact tends to get lost during any outreach since all most people are thinking about is the foods they dread to give up.
The dairy and meat lobbies are something else. It’s like smoking in the fifties.
It’s well established that there are serious health concerns when you consume animal produce (not to mention environmental and animal welfare ones), yet the industry keeps pushing back on plant-based alternatives.
I’ve heard of potential health issues from red meat consumption, but all animal products? That’s a first for me. Do you have any sources to share on this?
Technically it can’t be all animal products, since honey is about 98% sugar, and despite the hate campaign currently hitting carbs, sugar is not quite as harmful (in and of itself) as it’s made out to be.
But if we’re referring to all animal products in the sense of meat, dairy, and eggs - those three foods have nutritional properties that are all very similar and they do have some overlap in terms of health issues.
The biggest thing they have in common is being a package deal with high amounts of saturated fat and cholesterol. Heart disease is generally the industrialized world’s number one killer, and all three animal foods initiate the onset and progress the state of heart disease.
Then there are issues that are less settled, like to what degree do these foods cause various cancers?
And then this one is even more in need of further study, but there might be a link between these foods and autoimmune disorders.
https://www.pcrm.org/news/health-nutrition/meat-bad-you-and-environment
https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/processed-meat
https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/health-concerns-about-dairy
https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/health-concerns-with-eggs
I’m aware that there’s evidence of saturated fats having undesirable effects on your health. But plenty of meats are low in saturated fats (e.g. skinless chicken breast, or fish).
Relatively low if you compare it only to other meats or animal products. So while you can choose animal products that might progress these chronic metabolic diseases slower, you are still advancing them. But there are lots of factors that complicate things. For example the health impacts of animal products also depend on how you cook them, and what you eat them with. Cured meats are unanimously considered one of the worst things you can consume, right up there with smoking. Steamed fish would probably be about the least harmful (except that fish have some of the highest levels of bioaccumulated toxins and heavy metals). Actually, bugs are likely the least harmful, for those who are comfortable with that. Eating a source of fiber mitigates some of the harm from animal products as shown in this video:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C08mqjMuwyY
Further complicating things is that single nutrients often behave differently depending on context. For example antioxidants other than some of the essential vitamins have never been shown to produce their purported effects outside of laboratory conditions, and some supplemented sources of antioxidants have even been shown to be a little harmful. But when we test the whole foods that contain those antioxidants, we get data like how increasing leafy green consumption has been correlated with a longer life expectancy.
And it’s similar for saturated fats and animal products. In the most established science on the matter you’ll see they don’t just talk about saturated fat alone - the science appears to show a relationship between the ratio of saturated and unsaturated fats consumed, particularly polyunsaturated fats. This book describes that science quite well-
https://www.redpenreviews.org/reviews/eat-drink-and-be-healthy/
But going back to that nutrients vs whole foods, there might be more than just the fats at play. This piece by Colin Campbell is a bit of a manifesto against nutritional reductionism, and suggests that the animal proteins themselves might play more of a role than we had thought:
https://nutritionstudies.org/is-saturated-fat-really-that-bad/
When you put whole diets to the test, what starts to become most consistent is how the most whole-plant-dominant diets by far achieve the most remarkable results. It’s apparent in the Adventist Health Studies, the Esselstyn Heart Disease Reversal diet, as well as Dean Ornishes full lifestyle intervention program. The latter two claim they can reverse heart disease, which is a controversial claim. More study is needed to prove whether that’s true or false, but regardless it’s still apparent that these fully plant-based dietary interventions do more than any others to restore people to good health.
And it’s a thing where science and personal experience match. If you check out the online whole-food plant-based support communities, you see people routinely report almost miraculous changes to their health and wellbeing in a matter of weeks or even days. It’s the kind of thing that once you experience it fully enough, you don’t want to go back.
https://adventisthealthstudy.org/studies/AHS-2/findings-lifestyle-diet-disease
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/departments/wellness/integrative/esselstyn-program
