I am going to share a couple of examples where I wasn’t strictly vegan these past few weeks. I am sharing this not for other vegans but for those who would like to eat less animal products but perhaps don’t because they feel it’s too much to be strictly vegan. I think sometimes vegans, even kind, empathetic ones, inadvertently discourage others when they insist on perfection or choose to point out every little thing that isn’t vegan. Sometimes, a lot of the times even, with the way the market and animal by-products work, it just really doesn’t matter.
So both of my examples involve non-vegan vitamin D being added to foods. Recently I have been going to Aldi and buying hamburger buns there. For whatever reason, they add vitamin D3 to them. I have no idea why because it’s not usually a food fortified with D3, but they do. I don’t worry about it. I don’t want to go to a different store just for buns when I’m already there. For those that don’t know, generally D3 comes from sheep wool. It’s a by-product of the lanolin oil that is stripped from the wool for processing. No one would raise and shear sheep and go through all the steps of processing the wool simply to get vitamin D. They are shearing the sheep for the wool and everything else is just a bonus. So if you care, then the real thing to focus on would be avoiding wool. It really doesn’t matter if you avoid non-vegan vitamin D3 from the standpoint of decreasing demand for sheep agriculture. If I do have a choice that is just as easy and affordable, I will choose the one without D3, but I do that knowing it really doesn’t matter. The other example was I needed to do a curbside pickup at Target the other day and needed cereal. Usually I go for the non-D3 generic of Cinnamon Toast Crunch (Malt-o-Meal or the Aldi knock-off), which also is cheaper! But Target only had Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which has D3, or Cascadian Farms organic knock-off. The organic knock-off was $4.49 for a 9oz. box but the actual Cinnamon Toast Crunch was $6.49 for 32 oz. I needed more than 9oz. My husband would kill that box in 5 minutes! But also it was clearly a better deal to buy the large bag of Cinnamon Toast Crunch so that’s what I did. I had company arriving soon and needed another grocery item immediately so I didn’t have time to be going elsewhere (Walmart, for example, doesn’t do curbside pickup immediately. It has to be scheduled.) or to go in the store.
And if you’re wondering what I needed right away it was graham cracker pie crust. I was originally making tofu chocolate pudding pie. I had a leftover deep-dish frozen pie crust and had it baking. When I pulled it out, I bumped into the counter and my crust shattered. I already had made the filling which was going to cool in the bowl before I got it in a crust if I didn’t act a bit fast. I had no time to make a homemade crust. LOL. Then my mom was coming over too. So Target was the practical choice. Stuff happens, don’t let it ruin your day!