Vegan Recipes, Ideas, and Living » Misc

Nabisco Doesn’t Know What Sugar is in Their Products

Benjamin Jones — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:46:49 +0000

The other day I was thinking about how much I liked Nutter Butters, and I decided to drop Nabisco a line to see what kind of sugar they used in their products. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have any sort of consistent practice. This is probably to due different production facilities, suppliers, and prices, which makes sense. However, it does make it difficult to tell if their sugar uses bone char.

You can check out their email for yourself:

Hi Benjamin,

Thank you for visiting http://www.nabiscoworld.com .

Thank you for contacting us regarding the Nutter Butter Cookies.

The information that I have regarding you inquiry if the Nutter Butter Cookies are vegan is as follows:

I understand that knowing what ingredients are in the food products you eat directly affect how you practice your religion/dietary lifestyle, and Kraft Foods does all that it can to assist its consumers in making educated food decisions.

I apologize but unfortunately this ingredient information is not currently available.

As you can imagine our products change frequently, and maintaining a list of products for specific dietary practices would be virtually impossible.

In addition, in general, our products are analyzed for total sugars as opposed to specific types of sugar.

When sugar is listed as an ingredient, it refers to sucrose (table sugar).

Sucrose in our products can come from either sugar cane or sugar beets, depending on availability.

Sucrose is the same whether it comes from sugar cane or sugar beets.

“Sugars” as listed on the Nutrition Facts panel represents the total sugars in the product, not just sucrose.

“Sugars” refers to any sugar in a product that is added, naturally occurring or both.

An example of a naturally occurring sugar is the lactose in dairy products or fructose in fruits.

An example of an added sugar is sucrose (table sugar).

Thank you for taking the time to contact the consumer service center.

If you haven’t done so already, please add our site to your favorites and visit us again soon!

Kim McMiller
Associate Director, Consumer Relations

7 Tips for a Good Vegan Road Trip

Benjamin Jones — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:52:43 +0000

Because I am a cyclist with my college’s team, every year I end up travelling all about the country on the weekends, staying in hotels, and trying to get enough food to live properly. Based on what I learned last year and the obstacles I anticipate in the coming year, I decided to write a little guide on the necessities of travel.

1. Case the location online

Before I go anywhere I like to give a quick look over the place on google maps, searching not only for vegan restaurants, but restaurants in general. If the places look like they’ll be full of chains, I might check out the vegan options of each of them in advance. From this you can learn a whole lot, and do anything from plan where you’ll eat to where you might want to stay. If you’ll be in a larger city, a site like Yelp might also help.

2. Cook in advance

There’s nothing worse when you’re on the road than eating food that makes you feel like you’re on the road. For that reason I like to cook something that keeps in a container and that I can heat up quickly. Most times it will be something like rice and beans, chili, or even curry. It also helps if you can find something that you like both hot and cold.

3. Bring more than enough food

I can’t stress enough how important it is that you bring more food than you expect to need. Travel is tiring, so oftentimes you find yourself needing more nourishment than you thought. Also, you never know when you might be delayed by something like a rainstorm or whatnot, which might mean you’ll need more than you thought beforehand. The key to good planning is going overboard, and you don’t want to be stuck in the middle of Kansas with nothing but an Arby’s.

4. High calorie, salty drinks

Gatorade isn’t the favourite drink of many people, but calories and electrolytes are important for keeping your energy up. If you’re like me and you can drive from Missouri to New Jersey in 22 hours with three stops for gas, you don’t want to get tired from too much water and no calories.

5. Know what you’ll be eating along the way

On my most recent road trip, I was decently sure of what I could eat coming back. I’d done the 15 hour drive before, and I knew that I could either pick up stuff along the way or get a pizza at Papa John’s on the way out. However, since I would’ve had to wait for Papa John’s to open at 11am before I could leave, I decided it would be best to just get some food along the way. Well, the next day I didn’t feel so good. When you have a sure thing, take it instead of trying to roll the dice.

6. Dried fruits and nuts

Not only are they good for you, but they’re easy to lay your hands on and easy to eat while you’re in the car. This is one great way to stay healthy when you’re on the road, I wish I did it more often. Thanks to @muhajaba for the tip!

7. Homemade trail mix

Like the previous tip, but with a bit more granola and the possibility of creating some sort of bar-shaped food. Thanks again to @TheHumaneLeague for the tip!

Have any other ideas for taking the pain out of road trips? Share them in the comments.

A Trick for Making Great Sushi Rice with the Zojirushi

Benjamin Jones — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:44:18 +0000

A while back I talked about the new Zojirushi rice cooker that I had gotten, and how much I liked it. Nothing has changed on that front, but after having the thing for a few months I’ve learned one good trick that I wanted to share with you all, in case you were making rice under similar circumstances.

It may seem rather elementary, but if you want to make sure that your rice comes out nice and sticky, and has enough moisture to stay that way even if you have the “keep warm” feature on for a few hours, you need to add just a little bit more water than you’re supposed to. Usually when making two cups of rice, I just fill a tablespoon or two over the recommended amount. Doing this I have been able to really zero in on delicious rice every time.

Does anyone else have any secret rice cooker tricks?

CollegeVegan is now on Twitter!

Benjamin Jones — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 04:19:49 +0000

Hi all, just wanted to let you know that I recently signed up a Twitter account for myself so that i could communicate more easily with all you people across the nets that use the service. This is my first go with Twitter so I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I hope to use it to share thoughts, recipes, and interesting links and such.

Follow me!

Be sure to let me know in the comments if you’re also a user

Green Tea is Addictively Good

Benjamin Jones — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:30:21 +0000

Green tea is simple. Perhaps the only complicated thing about it is that it is not always green. Recently I’ve been searching the world for something to get hooked on that I can drink in massive quantities to replace my previous addiction to Dr. Pepper, which was not only horrible for me but creates a lot of aluminum and plastic waste that isn’t very attractive.

I think green tea is the answer, but there is a problem. As much as I love green tea on both a sensational and ideological level, I can’t drink it at night without getting bad heartburn that makes it hard to sleep and stays with me when I wake up in the morning. I find that the only way to neutralize the effects of a couple of cups of tea is to pour about half a gallon of water down my throat. This isn’t working.

So, I’m asking all you, what do you drink? Caffeine is not an issue for me (even at 3:30am, like right now), but I need something decently low calorie that can be consumed in great quantity and won’t cost that much or generate that much waste. Water is great, and I drink it all the time, but it’s also bland and sometimes I want a bit more.

Any suggestions? I feel like I need to kick my tea habit before it gets any worse!

What’re you eating for Christmas?

Benjamin Jones — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 07:16:55 +0000

I’m not a Christian, but my mother is so I celebrate Christmas with her. However, this year I didn’t really think about what to cook. Call me stupid for not thinking in advance, but I suppose nothing interesting will come of Christmas dinner.

So, I ask you: what do you vegans usually do for Christmas dinner? Feel free to share recipes and advice, . Thanks!

Get CollegeVegan Updates by Email!

Benjamin Jones — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 20:00:28 +0000

I’ve been updating the site a little bit lately, as you may have noticed, and one of the things I did was add the option for email subscription. If you look over to the sidebar you’ll see it next to the RSS subscription button. RSS is great but since most internet users don’t use it I thought it would be good to add a more traditional subscription method.

All you need to do is put in your email, verify that you’re a human, and then wait for the verification email to come. It may seem like a bit of a pain but it’s just to ensure that no one is getting spammed, since I definitely don’t want that! If you have any trouble, drop a comment and let me know. Thanks!

Pure Vermont Maple Syrup: Vegan Crack

Benjamin Jones — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 07:24:59 +0000

Over the years I’ve developed quite a few strange habits. One of these habits is taking big spoonfuls of maple syrup from time to time. I picked up this habit on spring break with the cycling team when I needed a quick, post-ride pick me up and couldn’t find anything vegan in the house besides a jar of maple syrup we’d dragged all the way down from New Hampshire with us.

As strange as it may sound, it worked. And while it’s not like I do it every day, it’s pretty much become “one of those things” in my life. Maple syrup is great for baking, so it’s always good to keep some around, and it really adds a distinct flavour to just about anything. From cookies to frozen waffles toasted on a George Foreman grill, just about anything is good with maple syrup.

Just be sure to get the good stuff. Don’t bother with the artificially coloured corn syrup in a bottle shaped like and old lady, that’s not maple syrup. The stuff in the picture is the good stuff. Pure, organic, and straight from a tree local to me in Vermont.

I may know a few people who tap their own trees, but no, I’m not a shill of the maple syrup lobby. This stuff is just good. And there’s no reason to quit! So, obviously, I’m a little obsessed. Does anyone else feel similarly about maple syrup?

Good Cookware Makes for a Happy Chef

Benjamin Jones — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 23:38:21 +0000

The other day I found myself in the need of some new cookware. I haven’t ever paid much attention to cookware, but I found that I would be better off with a decent saucepan and a skillet with a lid. It’s always been a bit of a pain to cook with limited supplies, and even though it required the stretching of my college budget, it has definitely been worth it.

You can see what I got here on Amazon (which has the best prices around):

I would definitely do it over again, and if anyone is wondering, these all work with magnetic induction cooktops, which are about the coolest thing in cooking, I think.

Have you bought any ridiculously indispensable kitchen tool recently? Let us know in the comments!

New Server!

Benjamin Jones — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 03:12:42 +0000

I don’t want to bore you with the nitty gritty, but I’ve moved the site to a new server (which is where I host my other sites, ecomodder and ecorenovator), so the page loads and things should be a lot faster. In the near future, I will also be adding a WordPress plugin that allows full page html caching, so that should speed things up a bit more. Not to bore you with the details, but I’m hoping I can make the site a bit more pleasant to navigate.

Sorry if it’s been slow before!

Vegan Potluck: Success!

Benjamin Jones — Sun, 11 May 2008 03:04:33 +0000

Sometime last week I decided it would be pretty sweet to host a potluck for some people from my vegan group and some friends, but didn’t get around to sending out the blitz (like email, but different) until Thursday, so I was kind of wondering if it would come together. As you can see, quite a few people showed up, as well as three more who aren’ t in the picture because they left early and another who came late.

Oddly enough, it was just me and a bunch of women, plus my roommate who isn’t vegan but just decided to mooch off our food, even though he was convinced he couldn’t be full without meat (he was rather full, though). The guy who came late was a guy, so it wasn’t completely one sided, but most of the time is seems like all the vegans and vegetarians are ladies, has anyone else noticed this?

I’d planned on making a new kind of lentil soup, but unfortunately all my kitchen stuff seems to be missing (reason unknown) and I only had one pot, so I made the tried and true lentil soup that I really love, along with my famous vegan chocolate chip cookies, which I’ve told we the best things there. Other people made chickpea salad, some sort of walnutty salad, enchiladas, and some other stuff I’m not remember right now, but right now I’m pretty overstuffed. Hopefully I can get some of those recipes later! If I can, I’ll be sure to post up.

Does anyone else ever throw a vegan potluck now and again? If so, do you invite non-vegans, as I did?

Vegan Road Trip!

Benjamin Jones — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:34:58 +0000

Okay, so I’m not in this picture, but I am going down for cycling spring break in just a few minutes! It will be interesting to be on the road and away from easy food choices while doing the vegan thing.

We leave today at 4 and plan to arrive in North Carolina after an breezy 18 hour drive, . I’ve packed up will, with energy bars, gatorade, miso soup, and some Hunan Dumplings from Marco Vegetarian. It should be interesting!

I’ll update with what I’ve learned when we get there and get settled in! Has anyone else had an experience like this? I hope it’s not as bad as I’m guessing it’ll be.

Good vegan blogs?

Benjamin Jones — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:55:26 +0000

I don’t know any, do you?

I haven’t been doing this blogging thing for too long (and have recently been sidelined by illness and finals), but I’d really like to know what other bloggers readers are following.

If you have your own blog or know some good ones, please share in the comments, , thanks!

How NOT to be a healthy vegan at college

Benjamin Jones — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 03:11:56 +0000

Three words: Eat like me.

Now now, I know it sounds awful (and even worse, it’s true), but I have awful eating habits at school. That’s not to say I don’t know how to eat well, perhaps that knowledge just makes me more aware of my unhealthy habits than others would be.

In any case, I eat badly. This is bad on two levels: it doesn’t help me feel well and it’s not helping my training for the cycling season. However, like various addicts I hope that spilling my guts will help me deal with my problem and help others avoid it themselves.

More on my awful diet after the break (and even some solutions!).

Here’s a breakdown of my day:
Breakfast: My day, as always, began badly by skipping breakfast. I rolled out of bed at 9, crammed in some homework I hadn’t done the night before, and headed off to my first class at 10 without any food.
Lunch: After classes were over at 1, I went to the slightly vegan-friendly (read “vegan food exists”) café and got some pasta with pretty decent tofu meatballs and some apple cider. Fine, not awful, but definitely a little flat.
Afternoon: After I zapped myself with a 23 mile bike ride, I picked up some Gatorade and two Luna bars for a post-ride snack. I won’t apologize for this, because I know how important it is to eat right after a good workout. (But perhaps some less-processed snacks would’ve been better).
Dinner: This is where it really gets bad. I had a bit of an early dinner of two burritos (again, not too bad, but also not good), which was fine. However, I was feeling pretty zapped so I went out with my roommate for a late dinner and ended up getting a soda and onion rings. Geez! Talk about junk…

Now, what I could’ve done better (without stepping outside of the bounds of normal college living, which is important in these extremely busy days I have right now):

Breakfast: To keep it simple, I should buy a box of Clif Bars, or some other brand of tasty bar, just so I have something to munch on every day to start things off.

Lunch: Soup, salad, and bread. These are usually available in vegan varieties everyday on campus. Perhaps not the most interesting lunch, but it has a good mix of food types and it hearty. Be sure to include some beans or tofu in your salad to get that much needed protein.

Afternoon: I wouldn’t do much different here. If you’re not exercising, skip the snacking. But, if you must, I suggest snacking on a banana, carrots, or something else you would have to eat a shocking amount of to gain weight.

Dinner: Dinner ought to look a bit like lunch, but I would likely include some pasta or a sandwich or something else a little denser to get me through ‘til 3AM if I really needed it (I often do). Just be careful not to eat anything you won’t want to sleep or will leave you wanting a junk snack around midnight.

Now, all this being said. I’m no nutritionist, but I am a vegan, cyclist, and former marathoner who has looked into nutrition quite a bit. My advice is that you do the same. As they say, knowledge is power, and a balanced diet is a good one!

The Great Debate: Is sugar vegan?

Benjamin Jones — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 01:47:00 +0000

This debate has gone on for quite a while, but it’s something that I find is relatively alien to newer vegans. As for me, I was introduced to the knowledge that sugar wasn’t vegan by my first friend in college. I was eating my standard snack food, bananas with peanut butter, when she grabbed my Skippy jar and announced that it had sugar in it.

“So what?” I responded. Of course I knew it was junky, unnatural peanut butter. What I didn’t know was that sugar was sometimes processed with bone char, and animal by-product. After she told me that, I felt like my very young vegan world had been spun on its head. Suddenly I become one of “those people” who compulsively read labels and held my breath waiting for sugar to pop up under the ingredients list of everything I liked to eat.

These days, when people ask my what’s most difficult about veganism, I usually respond that the uncertainty about sugar makes it difficult to eat some of the most innocuous foods.

So, that said. What is it about sugar that’s not vegan? As I’ve already mentioned, it is the troublesome nature of the bone char whitening process that makes certain sugars non-vegan. Sugar itself has no problems, whether its from sugar cane or beets (a large percentage of sugar comes from beets).

More after the jump!

However, the whitening process requires the use of charcoal. This charcoal does not need to be bone char, but oftentimes is. Because you can’t tell where your sugar comes from when it comes in another product, it’s usually best to avoid sugar in case bone char was used in processing.

This begs the question: Is there any way to figure out whether or not your sugar is vegan? Besides writing to the company, there’s not much you can do, but there are a few rules. For example, beet sugar never uses bone char as a filter. The same is true of organic or unrefined sugars (my personal choice). Beyond that, PeTA, in one of the few things they’ve done that I appreciate, has done a bit of digging for us:

“The following sugar companies DO NOT use bone-char filters:
Florida Crystals Refinery
P.O. Box 86
South Bay, FL 33493
407-996-9072
Labels: Florida Crystals
Refined Sugars Incorporated
One Federal St.
Yonkers, NY 10702
914-963-2400
Labels: Jack Frost, Country Cane, 4# Flow-Sweet
Pillsbury
Makes powdered brown sugar
Supreme Sugar Company (subsidiary of Archer Daniels Midland)
P.O. Box 56009
New Orleans, LA 70156
504-831-0901
Labels: Supreme, Southern Bell, Rouse’s Markets

The following sugar companies DO use bone-char filters:
Domino
1114 Ave. of the Americas
25th Fl.
New York, NY 10036
212-789-9700
Savannah Foods
P.O. Box 335
Savannah, GA 31402
912-234-1261
California & Hawaiian Sugar Company (with the exception of its Washed Raw Sugar)
830 Loring Ave.
Crockett, CA 94525-1104
510-787-2121”

So, with this knowledge in hand, keep in mind that I know many vegans who aren’t terribly strict about sugar. If it’s going to be a deal breaker for you, I was say forget about sugar and just do everything else.

If you know about the veganness of any products or sugar brands, do send me an email. I’m going to be contacting a few companies and trying to make a list!

Ingredients

Benjamin Jones — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 20:48:59 +0000

Not much to say here, but I wanted to point your attention to the new page on ingredients that I just put up. Hopefully some people will benefit from my experience there, as it can indeed be tricky learning to manipulate different ingredients in vegan cooking. Best of luck to you all with it!

Welcome to College Vegan

Benjamin Jones — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 19:15:36 +0000

Hello everyone, and welcome to my new blog, “College Vegan.” My goal here won’t be to lecture about why veganism is the best, what vegans “should” be doing, or endorse PeTA. At times I may discuss certain aspects of veganism and other nuts and bolts, but my main goal will be to provide an interesting look into veganism on campus.

As with many other such “liberal” pursuits, veganism is often picked up in high school or college. As such, college is often a sort of “proving grounds” for the vegan lifestyle. While I’m only in my second year I have seen friends pick up, drop, and endlessly waffle on the topic of veganism at school. Sometimes it’s too hard, too boring, or too expensive. Other times, we’re just not sure what’s right for us.

So, that considered, I’ve started this blog hoping to share my experience with veganism at college. Certainly, this is applicable to other students, but I hope that everyone will benefit from my discussion of the “vegan lifestyle.” I will be focusing on quick, cheap, and delicious foods for people who need to eat well but don’t have an unlimited supply of time or money to blow. However, I will also be detailing my ventures with social cooking and veganism, because when I have the time I often feel the best vegan food is shared vegan food.

Pfew! I hope that wasn’t too heavy. Thanks for stopping by!

************

About me: My name is Benjamin Jones, and I am a member of the Dartmouth College Class of 2010. I love my school and the people I’ve met there, and am extremely happy with it. I’ve been vegan since shortly before leaving for college and vegetarian for perhaps a little over 3 years. Some day I will post on the reasons why just to get that out of the way, but for now, just know that it’s multi-faceted.

Please feel free to contact me about anything at all. You can quickly and easily reach me by email at benjamin@collegevegan.com.