How to Buy Vegan Products

Whether your choice to adopt a vegan lifestyle was the easiest or the most difficult decision of your life, it can be frustrating to discover just how hard it is to find and buy vegan products. Though they’re plentiful and of superior quality to many non-vegan options, vegan products aren’t always advertised as such. It’s up to you to know what’s okay, and what’s not.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Avoid non-vegan ingredients in food. Of course, there’s the obvious meat, milk, cheese, butter, eggs and honey. But you need to memorize this list of commonly used vegan no-no’s too: whey, gelatin, casein, rennet, cochineal and shellac.

2. Avoid non-vegan ingredients in beauty products. Lanolin, for example, is a grease derived from sheep wool. Keratin is another common one, but it’s a protein made from hair, horns, hooves or feathers. Others to avoid include honey, beeswax, shellac (in nail varnish), civet, musk, castoreum, ambergis, chitin, tallow, gelatin, elastin, squalene, urea and propolis.

3. When shopping for household products, buy only those that say “Cruelty-Free” or “No animal testing. No animal ingredients.”

4. When shopping for clothes, avoid wool, leather, fur, feathers and any other material or adornment that came from an animal.

5. Find out which companies do not use animal testing or animal products. Just because it’s not on the packaging doesn’t mean it’s not vegan. Equally helpful is knowing which companies do test on animals. For lists of both, check out Cruelty-Free Companies linked to at the bottom of this page.

6. Find a store that caters to the vegan lifestyle. Health food grocery stores are a great place to start, especially the chains that are spreading like wildfire all over the country, making healthier food alternatives more affordable for us all. They carry everything vegan these days, from laundry detergent to shampoo. Of course, regular grocery stores also carry some vegan products, you just won’t find as wide a variety, and you’ll have to search harder to find them.

7. Search online for any vegan products you cannot find in your local stores, like cosmetics, hair color and shoes. Just be sure to use the word “vegan” in your search.

Tips & Warnings

• Always, always, always check the packaging. If a food item doesn’t say vegan, check the ingredients. If there’s an ingredient you do not recognize, err on the side of caution and look for something else. Then search online for that unknown ingredient so you know its origin next time. If a beauty product or household item does not have the Cruelty Free logo or say “No animal products, no animal testing,” check the ingredients. If there’s no ingredient list, again, err on the side of caution and move on.
• The non-vegan ingredients listed in the steps above is by no means exhaustive. These are only the most common. For a comprehensive list, check out the Comprehensive List of Non-Vegan Ingredients linked to at the bottom of this page.

Resources

• Cruelty-Free Companies
• Comprehensive List of Non-Vegan Ingredients

[theempire]

on 3/1/2009 Good article. A must for non-vegans giving gifts to vegans.