Arkansas Vegan: An online community and information source for vegans and vegetarians in Arkansas.
Vegan Convenience Foods
Which is organic?
Which is genetically modified?
Check out that little sticker on the fruit you just bought - it tells you some important information: any four-digit number means the fruit was conventionally grown. A five-digit number starting with 9 means it was organically grown. A five-digit number starting with 8 means it was genetically modified.
Easy Vegan Cuisine
Eating vegan is easy - vegan food is available in almost any grocery store. The hard part is in deciding what food is vegan and what food is not. To make that decision wisely a vegan has to have a greater knowledge of processed food ingredients than most other consumers. For example, most people may have never heard of lecithin, nor know that it can come from either animal or vegetable sources. What we want to do primarily with this page is lend a hand to those of you who may be trying vegan convenience foods for the first time. These pages will highlight some convenience foods that were vegan at presstime and may be ones you would like to try. We've enjoyed all these; hope you will too! Don't forget this site is all about YOU too, so feel free to share your comments, good and bad, about the stuff you find in the store.
Different people use different criteria to determine what is vegan or not vegan. For example, animal products may be used in the processing of some products such as refined sugars which are found in many products, and virtually no product will declare whether its sugar was bone-char processed or not. To determine what was vegan for inclusion on this site we looked primarily then at the final ingredients list and did not inquire with manufacturers about the use of animal byproducts in the processing of otherwise non-animal-byproduct ingredients. Should we learn that animal byproducts have indeed been used in processing ingredients or in the manufacturing process though we will remove that product from Arkansas Vegan. "Nuf said.
Now that that's out of the way, show me the food!
How do you define "vegan?"
A lot of people define veganim in terms of what we don't eat (e.g. "a person who doesn't eat meat or dairy"). Try instead to think of veganism in terms of what we do
eat. we're herbivores!
eat. we're herbivores!
As vegans we are some of the best educated food consumers out there. For example, how many non-vegans know as much as you do about food additives? How many non-vegans do you know that actually read the ingredients lists, and even know what the ingredients truly are? You're a smart (non-dairy) cookie!
