Vegan labelling

Last year, my wife became vegan. For animal welfare reasons mainly. I have remained, however, resolutely vegetarian, on the grounds that I like milk, cheese and eggs too much to give them up, and would rather spend my time happily chomping them while campaigning for a better deal for cows and chickens. So it hasn’t really impacted a lot on our lifestyle, apart from having to give up on take-aways where we can’t be sure that the contents are 100% dairy-free. The worst bit is having to cook two versions of the same meal sometimes, one with a cheesy topping and one without.

One thing which it has brought to my notice, however, is the paucity of information and patchy labelling of products as being suitable for vegans. If you are a vegan, these days, the situation regarding food labelling is just as bad for you as it used to be for vegetarians twenty years ago when I went veggie. It’s ridiculous that, in this day and age, when vegetarian labelling is mainstream and you can tell by looking at the label that it’s gluten-free or packaged in an atmosphere that may contain nuts, that you still have to scrutinise the list of ingredients, and in some cases look up the contents of individual e-numbers, to find out if something is vegan or not.

Apart from anything else, the people responsible are missing out, big-style. When I do the online shopping order, and I see something my wife might like, I do actually, most times, take the trouble to find out if it is actually suitable for vegans, sometimes even to the extent of phoning the supermarket in question’s customer care line. My wife never does this. If she is shopping, spots something that she fancies, but can’t find out if it’s suitable for vegans or not, she just puts it back and goes and buys something that she knows is suitable. So the manufacturers of the first product, if it was vegan, have lost a sale. All they needed to have done was to put “suitable for vegans” on the outside somewhere.

In time, obviously, people are going to wise up to this, and I hope that “suitable for vegans” as a labelling convention, will become as widespread and mainstream as “suitable for vegetarians” now is. But listen, Sainsbury’s if you are reading this, you are losing sales, and your marketing department may contain nuts. Nuts who don’t realise the commercial value of accurate food labelling. Still, on your head be it.