Is your code vegan?

After I saw an ad for a vegan higiene product I keep wondering "do the word 'vegan' actually means what I think it does?"
I mean, how do an object made of silicon and plastic could be "not vegan"?!?

Depends what you think it means, I think. Some soap and wash products are made with animal fat, so if your definition of 'vegan' is some variation of 'does not include animal products', you're probably good.

@ComputerToucher seriously? in the 21st century? I thought animal fat soap would be like whale oil lamps, something that was once economically viable but today it would be prohibitively expensive when compared to cheap synthetics.

But that was most of my question, though. Do plastics or chemicals are "not vegan" for being synthetic? Like oil-derived food coloring and aromatizers. Or synthetic medicinal conconitions.

Basically, I was wondering if vegans were about "avoid harming animals" as much as "avoid anything that isn't plants"

@JsonBoa surprisingly yes, still. In the 21st century.

I’d probably answer that last question by casually suggesting an expansion of how you understand “veganism”, personally.

Meaning: it’s entirely possible to eat a vegan diet for purely dietary reasons while still purchasing and using non-plant-based/synthetic products like bath soaps, face oils or other stuff—for example.

Nope, I slap a sausage over it just to be sure it works before release.

My code is bullshit so it's not vegan.

What the fuck, I found a product that says the following:

Non-Vegan Line- Artisan Soap
This limited line is available to all our non-vegan customers who appreciate quality artisan soaps with additives of animal origin. Our non-vegan soaps, however are still made with plant-based oils and butters and do not contain any animal fat.

we have an industry that produces meat that is cheaper than an vegetarian diet.
Soap is made using an simple process where fat is converted to soap and since the meat industry iss generating so much old fat, this is recycled into soap.

I think if a soap is fully synthetic, it's really a detergent.

@electrineer wait, what?

Most oils, food residue, and other kinds of dirt you can find around you contain carbohydrates. That's why chemically speaking, all soaps and detergents for the past 4000+ years consist primarily of varying-length molecules with carbohydrate chains on one end, connected to some polar group on the other since they mix well with carbohydrates in the dirt and allow them to be washed away.

Now, you have three possible sources of long chains of carbohydrates: animal fat, plant fat, and oil.

- oil: the least renewable option, expensive, linked to many wars, production causes significant pollution (e.g. fracking, spills)
- plant fat: produced mainly in tropical regions where large amounts of rainforest are destroyed to make room for plantations, also relies heavily on chemical fertilisers to boost production
- animal fat: a by-product of the food industry, cheap, doesn't have that many uses, doesn't cause additional pollution to produce

@electrineer Same problem as 'why should vegan "meat" look like chicken-breasts or steak'...
Do we want our steak to look like cabbage ?
So now whe have vegan soap made to look like non-vegan soap... yey ~!~

@Grumm its just the packaging.

In continuation to the comment from @EmberQuill ::

Look around, your management may be non-vegan, because it's full of animalistic shit. (I hope yours is something else, at least.)

Also, why do we need to generalize the definition of veganism, again?

Some items which does not contain any animal products are still considered "non-vegan", since it has been tested on animals

@swagnette I test all my code on animals first

I learned a lot from dating a vegan a couple of years back. I got so confused when she told me I had to get rid of my office chair lmao, but apparently she looked up my chair on the internet and found out it was real leather.

Also learned out about how things which clearly did not contain any animal products could still be non-vegan.

I still miss that chair though, did not make my back feel like crap

@swagnette thorwing out a good chair because of a woman... Mistakes were made, dude.

@JsonBoa product wouldn't be considered vegan if it was animal tested. Or if it uses the process harmful for animal or uses any coloring that is animal derivative, like cochineal, which is basically milled bugs.

@mazabin but any human derivatives are ok, right?

@electrineer they killed kittens to extract pheromones but they didn't use the fat because animal fat bad.

@mazabin even bugs? wow, veganism requires lots of homework.

@JsonBoa So those cricket crackers aren't a good alternative 😱

tablets and mobiles aren't vegan due to the screens (and other components)

Nobody can be completely vegan, you can only try your best to limit damage.