Meatless Mondays: 5 Foods that are Surprisingly NOT Vegan

When you make the switch to eating as a vegetarian/vegan, there are certain foods that are easy to assume are "safe." Here's why they're not. 

1) Some fruit snacks- If the ingredients on your box of fruit snacks says "gelatin" then there are some animal by-products in there! Gelatin comes from animal collagen. When the collagen is boiled, it produces gelatin. I would have never thought that a "fruit" snack would have animal products, but the gelatin is what gives them their jelly-like texture. Some brands to look out for are Welch's, Kellogg's, and Ocean Spray (contains beeswax). 


2) Lay's Baked BBQ Potato Chips (and host of other Lay's chips products)- While I was eating at Quizno's recently, I got these chips (as I have many times before) and read the ingredients- to my surprise!  If you read the ingredients, it says, "Natural flavor (Contains Milk, Barley, Chicken)." Chicken?? Why would there need to be a chicken flavor in BBQ chips? 


3) Some soups- Soups have vegetable, chicken or beef broths generally. When you go out to eat, be sure to ask what base the soup has. I've been to restaurants where their "vegetable" soup actually comes from a chicken broth base!


4) Some beers- This includes Guinness Stout, Murphy's Irish Stout and Fosters. Guinness has garnered a lot of media attention for having "isinglass" in their beers, which is a fish product. 


5) Honey - Bees make honey, which technically makes honey an animal product. Granted, the bees use flower nectar as well, so there is a plant-base, but if you go by a strict definition of veganism, then honey qualifies.