Guide to Food Ingredients | Vegetarian Resource Group

Ingredients can be composed of multiple parts where each part may be derived from a different source. The common preservative, sodium benzoate, is an example. It contains both mineral (sodium) and synthetic (benzoate) parts. In these cases, both (or all, if more than two are present) sources are listed. Processing aids, used during the commercial processing of an ingredient, may be unknown or vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. A common example is cattle bone char used to decolorize cane sugar. Consumers can inquire about processing aids when in doubt. In many cases, manufacturers do not have to list processing aids on food labels. Only careful research may reveal their presence. Manufacturers may call them "proprietary." "Synthetic" ingredients may contain components derived from several different sources such as animal, plant, microbial, or mineral sources. In all cases, the word refers to something that has been created in a laboratory by a chemical process. Since most synthetic ingredients today derive ultimately from petrochemicals, which consist of both decayed plant and animal matter, all synthetics are technically of plant and animal origin. For the purposes of this Guide, synthetic ingredients, except those known to contain non-vegetarian substances as defined in the section above, are classified as vegan. Non-vegetarian or non-vegan aspects of vegetarian food production exist at the agricultural or transportation level, such as insects inadvertently killed during harvesting or the use of manure or other animal-derived substances as fertilizer on fruit or vegetable crops. Now it is economically unfeasible given current agricultural practices for most companies to ensure that their foods were produced in a completely vegetarian manner. (This situation may change in the distant future because of technological and agricultural innovations and consumer interest.) Consumers, foodservice and healthcare professionals, dietitians, and food manufacturers always have a changing and expanding knowledge base about how ingredients are sourced and how food ingredients are processed. As information about food ingredient sourcing and processing becomes more readily available, people's perceptions and expectations of what is vegetarian or vegan slowly change. Consequently, consumer demands may evolve while company executives and food technologists may alter their methods and change ingredient sources to meet emerging preferences, needs, and economics. For example, consider the transformation seen over the last thirty years with regard to the cheese enzyme, rennet, (once an almost exclusively animal-derived substance to a now largely microbially sourced ingredient in most U.S. domestic cheeses). Some vegetarians once may not have even been aware of rennet in cheese, but now many vegetarians want to know its source and may refuse to purchase or eat animal rennet-containing cheese. The writer observes the same evolution occurring in the case of L-cysteine, now typically extracted from duck feathers, and predicts that it may one day become largely microbially produced. (Now, microbial production of this amino acid is very expensive.)