Vegan Dinner: Veggie Stew

A simple, hearty vegetable stew. Perfect for a chilly Denver day. Green lentils, carrots, a potato, leeks, shallots, celery and spices crock-potted for 3 hours or so in vegetable broth. This was super easy to make and probably breaks down to about $1.00 per serving. Not bad, considering we used all organic ingredients. I can’t think of many meals with more nutrition than a pot full of vegetables! Lots of protein in those lentils, too. Very tasty results.

Vegan Lunch: Smothered Burrito

We finally put some of those frozen Hatch green chiles to use and made a big pot of vegan green chile with garbanzo beans, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and cooked crock-pot style. Now we can put the stuff on everything for a while. I made a quick little breakfasty burrito with Yves breakfast patties crumbled up with some Tofutti cream cheese inside.

Vegan Dinner: Curry and Rice

Red Indian curry with chickpeas, red peppers, tomatoes, and onions. Yellow basmati rice with raisins and cashews. So good.

                                   

Tofutti, This Bugs Me:

Why don’t your products say they are vegan?

First off, I should say that I love Tofutti products. The dairy-free visionaries have come up with some amazingly good vegan substitutes. The two pictured above are staples in my fridge: Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese and Better Than Sour Cream. When I first tried them in my days of vegan infancy, I was so happy that I could keep eating bagels and tons of sour cream loving recipes cruelty-free. They are actually delicious, and the ice cream sandwich substitutes Tofutti Cuties are arguably better than real ice cream sandwiches!

The problem I am having with the company is their labelling. It’s a small thing, but it has become an annoying pet peeve: nowhere on any of these three products that I constantly buy does it say VEGAN. According to the company website, they are vegan, and the containers seem to scream every other way of saying vegan without the actual word, but no little Certified Vegan V logo, or even tiny print anywhere.

Here are the words describing Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese from its own packaging:

• Milk Free
• No Dairy
• No Cholesterol
• No Lactose
• No Butterfat
• No Animal Derivatives
• Non-dairy lactic acid (in the ingredients)

See what I mean? They kinda get the message across, but why not just throw the word Vegan up there somewhere? I know it would be redundant with all that other stuff, but it would help. This may seem like nitpicking, but I think it would help Tofutti sell some more stuff. Vegans are cautious about what they buy. Many of us have been burned by not realizing that certain dairy-free products are not also vegan (like Lisanatti Almond cheese) because they still have animal ingredients. Even though we ritualistically scour ingredient lists, we like to see VEGAN somewhere on the packaging to ease our minds. Leaving it off just makes us uneasy: is there some wierd ingredient on there that we missed? Do I not know what one of those ingredients actually is?

Tofutti, you are a godsend to the vegan community. Your products give us something to brag about to friends who think vegan products must all taste terrible. Why not brag that you are vegan? Are you afraid of scaring off those customers who think “vegan” equals “tasteless?” It just bugs me!

I can understand that big mainstream companies like ClifBar would leave the word vegan off their packaging (even though most Clif products are vegan friendly) for fear of the uninformed customer thinking “Vegan? Ick.”, but Tofutti is a niche brand selling things that vegans in particular want. It’s a small thing. Just think about it.