1) I tried vegan cheese. It was absolutely vile. To be fair, it was a cheese sauce rather than solid "cheese", but it was not nice.
2) In a crowded London bar, clutching Fran's drinks crib sheet in my hot hand, it emerged that the bar didn't sell any beer or cider (didn't even try wine) that was vegan-safe. So I went for the safe option - vodka and juice. London prices mean that this is not a sustainable option for anyone's bank balance (it must have been almost £7), and I believe is highly unfairly discriminating against vegans.
But two nice things have balanced them out:
1) In the engineering canteen today, merrily helping myself to the free coffee (there's free morning coffee in Engineering, apparently someone left it to the department in his will, since engineers need caffeine to do useful things), the lovely lady in the canteen approached, and asked if I was the "soya milk girl". Last week, I had enquired about soya milk since they don't stock it, and they thought it might be possible - but they had remember, and were very happy about it. So if anyone's using the canteen, just request the soya milk! (its hiding in the fridge so as not to confuse people)
2) A few more people have joined in now as well, which is really nice. General morale seems fairly high, particularly once you take Milos out of the equation...(sorry). Fran's mother and sister are taking part, and also Florence's friend Katy, who I then coincidentally met in a pub, and she informed me that the health shop does chocolate vegan spread. Small things.
My last post looked at how changing your diet could save enough carbon to be on an equivalent scale to taking international flights. This is still true, but thinking about it further, it makes me feel a little unconfortable - that by reducing your impact in one area, you're effectively "free" to increase it in another. The morality of this has been an argument used against carbon trading schemes, and this website, cheatneutral.com (whilst a little bit irritating) highlights this point.
There's been quite a bit of discussion over why wine isn't actually vegan. So...as you might expect, its because many wines are made using animal-derived ingredients to assist in the wine processing. Mostly, these ingredients are filtered out of the wine before its sold, but the use of animal ingredients in the creation make them "unsuitable for vegans". Typically these ingredients are used as processing aids in the filtration part of the winemaking process to help remove solid impurities (e.g. grape skins, stems, pips), to remove the yeast used in the fermentation process or to adjust the tannin levels. The most common animal ingredients used are isinglass (a very pure form of gelatine from sturgeon fish bladders), gelatine (extract from boiled cow's or pig's hooves and sinews), egg whites (or albumin) and caseins (a protein from milk). Also very occasionally blood has been used as an additive, but this was declared illegal for use in European wines in the aftermath of the outbreak of BSE (mad cow disease).
(thanks to Vegan Wine Guide FAQ, http://vegans.frommars.org/wine/faq.php)
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