Vegan food tasting non-vegan

[mariana]

Something strange has been happening to me today and I was just wondering if this has happened to anyone else before... So I've been a vegetarian my whole life and went fully vegan about 3 weeks ago (?) but I've been slowly becoming vegan for about 8 years (long story), so I haven't had any cravings for non-vegan food. I've heard about people's taste getting more perceptive after they go vegan and I feel like that started to happen to me in the last few days...but then today something really strange happened and all my vegan food started tasting non-vegan. For example, I had rice noodles in a peanut butter sauce for lunch today, and although the sauce was creamy from the peanut butter, it suddenly started to taste like it had (dairy) cream in it which is impossibly since I made the sauce myself and the noodles were definitely vegan. Then this afternoon I had some bittersweet chocolate for a snack and it tasted like it had milk in it...I triple checked the label but it didn't have any hidden milk products in it! For dinner tonight I made pecan garlic rice from a box mix and when I tasted it it tasted like it had cheese in it! I must have checked the box 20 times but it didn't have any animal products listed in the ingredient list... Has this happened to anyone else? Am I going crazy?

[harpy]

Weird! Maybe you're adjusting to the absence of dairy products in things so that they now taste 'complete' to you without the dairy ingredients? I have to admit that this doesn't seem like a very adequate explanation though!

[mariana]

I was thinking something along those lines...like maybe I'm just starting to notice more umami flavors in vegan food or something...doesn't really seem like a good explanation to me either though. Maybe I'm just crazy.

[harpy]

Yes, it's possible the inclusion of dairy foods was masking other flavours in some way. Whatever the reason, it seems like good news on the whole

[mariana]

Agreed. I guess I'm not crazy--my sense of taste is just getting better. Hurray for vegan food!

[sugarmouse]

Funny you should mention that I made some Kale soup lasnite and it tasted cheesy for some reason!Even though obviously having made it myself, its impossible anything cheesy got into it.

[mariana]

So it's not just me!! That's so weird...

[steven1222]

I have sometimes had food that tastes like it contains an animal product.

It is usually an imagined taste caused by fears that it may be contaminated or mislabeled, but the taste experience feels very real.

[mariana]

That could definitely explain my experience with the chocolate and the rice...but I still don't understand my fear of dairy in my noodles since all it was was rice noodles with a peanut sauce I'd made myself from peanut butter, rice vinegar, chili pepper, soy sauce, etc.! It was so weird!

[Roxy]

See this kind of stuff worries me. The other day, I had a veggie burger made with a soy patty. It kinda looked meaty, and I wondered, how would I know if it was meat? Would it taste like meat? What does meat taste like? I don't even remember! Anyway, I doubled checked the ingredients and it definately was a vegan patty lol. But still.....it's a bit worrisome.

[mariana]

Roxy, I do that all the time with veggie burgers! I'm especially paranoid if I go to a BBQ or party and they serve both veggie burgers and meat burgers because I'm so afraid they might accidentally give me the wrong kind of burger! And since the only time I've had a bite of burger was when I was about 3 or 4 years old, I have no recollection of it so I'd probably have no idea it's not a veggie burger! So when I'm at a party I always make a friend taste it for me first, lol. I think they think I'm really paranoid, but whatever.

[treehugga]

I find the same with vegan sausage rolls. Unless I make them myself, which I do using nuts, I find they taste too realistic to me and I can't eat them.
The same often happens with fake meat products which make me feel like I'm eating corpses.

[mariana]

Yeah, I'm not really a huge fan of fake meat...I don't care for the texture or the taste of most kinds! My dad (who's vegetarian) won't eat most fake meats or sea vegetables because they taste "fishy" to him. He also won't eat ketchup because it reminds him too much of hamburgers!