Vegan margarine

[Gwydion]

Yeah, that's what I meant.


:umm_ani:

[harpy]

I'm kind of confused, though. I've been told that canola is essentially genetically modified rapeseed. This implies ALL canola plants are genetically modified; is this right? One site seems to say that the plant itself is modified, but the oil is identical to that you would get from the non-modified plant.

No, I don't think it's genetically modified - I think it was just selectively bred, to get plants with less erucic acid etc, and this happened decades ago before genetic modification was possible. (The Wikipedia entry on canola confirms this although of course we can't believe everything we read on the internet :D )

ETA of course selective breeding modifies genes in a sense but it's not what people usually mean by GM, which involves splicing genes together in a lab regardless of whether the organisms could interbreed naturally.

[Kimberlily1983]

Harpy, thanks for your response. Sounds good to me: we'll stick with organic canola oil.

I've got nothing against selective breeding; this has been done thousands (?) of years, or a very long time anyway, and has not caused any major ecological or health problems to my knowledge. As for GM, I'm sure not all GMOs are harmful, but as there's evidence to suggest some might be, and Monsanto cannot be trusted (it's clear they don't care about safety), I try to avoid them as much as possible.

[Tigerlily]

I stopped using butter/margarine before I went vegan, so I've never checked this, but... aren't a lot of the regular soy margarines vegan?

I'm not sure what it's like in Europe, but in North America, NO. 98% of margarine have some sort of dairy (usually whey and/or casein). There's also a big trend to for them to manufacture half margarine and half butter in one container. It kind of sucks. Luckily Canada now has two vegan alternatives for margarine/butter.

[Kimberlily1983]

I stopped using butter/margarine before I went vegan, so I've never checked this, but... aren't a lot of the regular soy margarines vegan?

I thought that, too, when I went vegan. It's a good thing I was into checking every label - even things I was sure were vegan - because we would have gone on eating it. It's as Tigerlily says, they all add whey or some other crap to it, at least in our part of the world. :(

[Tigerlily]

I've even seen gelatin added to some margarines too. :(

[jimmeh]

I've even seen gelatin added to some margarines too. :(

Flora spread in the UK used to do that but then they remembered there are a fair number of folk who wouldn't buy it because it's not halal. Never mind the vegans. But, a small win nevertheless.