Taifun Soft Silken Tofu Ingredients Query

[Oliver Oil]

This particular tofu (a Life Food GMBH product) lists "bio-dynamic cultivated soyabeans" in its ingredients. Is this a fancy term for GM soyabeans?

[fiamma]

Wikipedia describes biodynamic agriculture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodynamic_agriculture)as "an ecological and sustainable farming system." Could that be what you're looking for?

[Mr Flibble]

Biodynamic is what some countries call organic as far as I know. Taifun is definately GMO free, there's info on their website here:

http://www.taifun-tofu.de/engl/default.asp

I get through a *lot* of their tofu

[twinkle]

Biodynamic is "stricter" than organic - I think it takes 7 years to convert a field to fully biodynamic as opposed to 4 for organic. It's *not* veganic.

[Oliver Oil]

fiamma - Thanks for the link. Someone else also gave me that link. (Wikipedia is fast becoming one of my favourite websites. Seems like they've got it all covered.) Interesting and enlightening reading.

Mr Flibble - Another helpful link. Thank you. Nice to see they've included some recipes for each type of tofu in the range. Do you know of any mail order companies that carry the whole range of their plain tofu by any chance?

twinkle - You're right. Biodynamic farming is most certainly not vegan. The field and compost preparation methods used that are so vividly described at Wikipedia leave me in no doubt about that. Then again, I'm not sure if organic farming is vegan either, unless it's stockfree organic, but correct me if I'm mistaken. I don't see my local supermarkets stocking up on produce from the latter anytime soon though. It's taken long enough to introduce regular organic produce. It's a case of grow your own or take what you can get, I suppose.

[herbwormwood]

Biodynamic is "stricter" than organic - I think it takes 7 years to convert a field to fully biodynamic as opposed to 4 for organic. It's *not* veganic.

Biodynamic specifies the use of some animal products such as cows horn, as well as planting by the moon's cycles.

[Mr Flibble]

Indeed, thou if it's any consolation as far as i can tell the composts that are produced use almost all plant materials, with minute amounts of animal products to aid fermentation that aren't in the final product. The demeter production standards specify only that 25% by volume of soil contains compost, which can be of plant or animal origin.

Certainly there are many biodynamic products that claim to be vegan, and vegan restuarants serving biodynamic wine. Whilst it is still not 100% vegan in the extreme sense of the word, the amount of animal product to grow grapes for a bottle of wine are magnitudes less than those used to fine it if non vegan agents are employed.

There's more info here: http://www.biodynamic.org.uk/FAQ.htm
and here: http://demeter.net/standards/st_production_e06.pdf

[twinkle]

I call myself vegan, and I will certainly eat biodynamically produced food. I was trying to say that it's not stricter in terms of veganness though :)