Sugar & Glue: Are Vegans Really Better Than Vegetarians?

I got a message from a longtime viewer
and support on patreon raising the issue of the practical impossibility of being a hundred percent vegan with reference to the use of bone char in sugar so I know as vegans we do like to give vegetarians a hard time in terms of the distinction that vegetarians make implicitly or explicitly but many vegetarians explicitly do discuss this terms of their rationalization for consuming milk and cheese but not consuming you know the flesh of cows the distinction the vegetarians make between a product and a by-product now if you're vegan you probably regard that as a lazy moral excuse in that you would think if you buy milk you are still supporting the dairy industry if in fact you buy leather you're still supporting the dairy industry because the production of milk and the production of leather are in fact two separate stages of one in the same industry when you buy milk you're paying for real and when you buy veal you're paying for milk they're not really separable in terms of the cycle of production and we may say the cycle of suffering and the cycle of both ecological damage and exploitation of animals that's involved now that haven't been said there are limits to this practically in the life of a vegan so this person writes to me and says I watched a video from a channel called vegan in Japan about Japanese candy and why Japanese candy is not vegan because the refined cane sugar they use has been processed with bone char in Japan so this is an issue I have been aware of for a very long time I think most of you are aware of it maybe some of you are surprised but this is not really this is not the addition of animal bone to sugar but it is using animal bone in the filtration in the refinement of the sugar so there are imperiled of this there are some there are some methods used in making beer that likewise filter out some of the impurities from beer by using a gelatin-like substance called isinglass so I believe when you were eating the sugar you are not eating the bone char or you're not eating significant quantity of it maybe there's a trace amount there but you are paying for the company to buy animal bones and those are a byproduct to the production of meat and to use animal bones in the production of refined white sugar now to be clear not all sugar has this problem if you're in a western country the easiest way is to choose a turbinado sugar as its cold I think I'm brands like red so we're not a word that's a magical vocabulary but there are some forms of brown sugar and you'll notice they don't quite have the same glistening appearance and those do not rely on the use of bone char to produce them and they're often they're not even marketed as vegan there's simply more than one way to refine sugar and they don't all involve the use of bone char however if you're buying something like a chocolate bar you have no way of knowing whether or not the sugar used to make that choco bar is vegan depending on where you're living in the world big industries will use whatever the cheapest form of sugar is so you can do some research as to whether or not generally the candy industry or the chocolate bar industry or the breakfast cereal industry whether they are generally using non vegan sugar or if they're using Pikachu but that will change from place to place I mean like within the United States Ness it's a big country it's possible that in some states the cheapest available form of sugar happens to be vegan but in many many places it's not in many plates this is an industry standard way to to refine sugar and it may be the cheapest form available but generally when they want to make sugar that has this kind of bright you know what reflects light in a pleasing way those varieties of sugar tend to be refined using bone char and those are animal bones by prior to the meat industry so she comments in Japan the United States and Canada most of the sugar being used in processed foods does have bone char I'm apparently she says in some parts of Europe it's the opposite again this is my impression generally but you have to check wherever you're living it can vary from place to place she says we are going to Japan on the fifth of November oh okay that's coming up in just a few days fifth of November 2016 okay have a nice trip um I realized that avoiding point bone char sugar would be not being able to eat any processed food such as candy but again anything like anything containing sugar she gives the example of rice crackers me Rin but even soup most soup has sugar in it so you know and there's no way to find out whether a product is made with beet sugar or cane sugar it's even more complicated than that whether or not it happens to be vegan because it's the the processing method used so she has come to the conclusion that avoiding sugar is taking Venus I'm a step too far beyond its definitions this is in reference to the original definition of veganism being that you do everything that is practicable not practical practicable in English those are two slightly different words slightly different meanings so she says I talked about it with my boyfriend and he had come to the same conclusion so I wonder how the so-called junk food vegans can exist in the u.s. if all cookies snacks and soft drinks are produced with this non vegan sugar so it's try again it varies but yeah the vast majority my impression is the vast majority United States are produced with not vegan sugar well and she may or may not know it but some of the raw vegans and some of the vegans who oppose all processed food or all cooked food they do invoke this kind of concept they do draw attention to the fact that in general the the sugar in refining process food of any kind is not going to be vegan and there are some people who choose to be raw vegan or to refuse to buy anything that's in a box whether they refuse to eat a chocolate bar they refused to breakfast cereal or anything like that so recently her boyfriend also found that the alcohol free beer he enjoyed was not a hundred percent vegan not because of any of the ingredients but because the glue used to fix the label to the bottle was not completely vegan so non vegan glue is a problem in the packaging of many allegedly vegan products because the glue used for the bottle or the box may not be really vegan and then beyond that she says the glue used in allegedly vegan shoes may not be vegan correct so I knew about that for 490 years now I've known about that for quite some time that it is a problem that you can be using but even when you look into mainstream shoes and even specialized vegan shoes actually the glue that's used to keep the different layers of the soul affixed to one another that is very often a non-vegan glue so the interesting thing that this is not how she phrases it in her email to me the most interesting intellectually stimulating thing here is that in some ways vegans actually indulge in some of the same distinctions of convenience that vegetarians engage in vegans due to some extent make a distinction between what is a product and what is merely a byproduct because we have to you know we have to live in the modern world we have to be able to buy shoes that do not have leather butter nevertheless not be so she says do you think about the glue when you find a pair of shoes in your size do you think about the glue that's used to a fixed attack or a label to juice cucumbers etc etc she says I don't even think it's good to promote avoiding sugar and glue as vegans because this might just discourage people from being vegan entirely it's already enough of a challenge obviously for many people to live without wool silk beeswax and other hidden ingredients you know like l-cysteine and there are many many hidden ingredients right and she also says I wonder if boycotting refined sugar can bring any change the sugar industry right so I mean it breaks down to a look I mean to me there are sort of three things to say about this one when you actually buy sugar in a bag when you buy sugar as an ingredient to use yourself if you're baking bread yourself that's when you can make the choice that's when you can make the decision to use a vegan sugar as opposed to not making sure that's when you have the power and the option as a as a consumer and there but there are many many contacts when as a consumer you do not have the option and that is why to come back to something you may have heard before in this channel we have to get organized and we have to get involved in a political lobbying obviously things would change if we had a law passed in any country if we had a law passed that was addressed to actually labeling products about what type of sugar was used in their manufacture then you could have the beginnings of consumer choice to distinguish between you know the same way that some people want to label genetically modified versus non je clarified so that consumers have a choice if you start to label it you're the beginning of something you could also tax them differently you could have a very mild you know one percent tax to encourage industry to be using the non bone char sugars and as I understand it the in most products if you're not actually making something like a horrid candy where the appearance of the sugar matters they can use vegan sugar and get results that are just as good now no no maybe I'm wrong maybe somebody's a real expert on making candy is going to explain to me that there are other subtle differences but to my knowledge almost all food when it's not the problem the appearance of the food using vegan sugar does not have any disadvantage and it's only a few foods that would really matter for so we need labeling we need taxation and without laws from the top down without lobbying for hierarchical change we're never going to get those changes there are some changes we cannot agitate for simply as disaggregated isolated individuals and this is one example another example you might not care about because you probably don't smoke cigarettes the difference from vegan and non vegan cigarettes that's also something where you need to have labeling and maybe taxation and other policies interview but the the third thing I've already mentioned things interesting is that we like to think that veganism is in a completely separate category from vegetarianism because we refuse to play the game of saying well this is a product and this is a byproduct and that products matter ethically whereas byproducts do not but when we get into some of these difficult gray areas actually vegans are forced to make some of the same compromises that vegetarians make because the end of the day we have to wear shoes and we have to buy products with labels and we can't choose you know the glue that's used for the label and it's possible even the company making that product can't choose I don't know I've never looked into that when I was working in the book publishing industry I looked into the chemistry of the glues used for binding books who the devil is in the details that's scary you know and traditionally even the glue that's used to a fixed wallpaper to the wall had animal products and an animal fat animal skin basically so you know we make the choices that we can make as individuals but then we get organized so that we can press forward with the choices that we can't make as mirror individuals