A snack bar called “SoyJoy” just sounds vegan, doesn’t it? But the ingredients of these bars include: “Butter (from milk),” “Egg,” “Milk Chocolate Chips,” “butter oil,” “fermented milk powder” and “Parmesan Cheese.” That makes SoyJoy a non-vegan pretender, putting it high atop the vegan shitlist.
The reason SoyJoy immediately sounds vegan is that soy is a replacer food that is only rarely intended for those who can guiltlessly eat the real thing. True, soy can replace either meat or dairy, so it’s not unusual for soy to crop up in a vegetarian but not vegan scenario, as it does here. However, since most snack bars are vegetarian to begin with, it’s easy to assume that the soy here (so prominent an ingredient as to be in the name of the product) must be replacing dairy.
Yet there is both soy and dairy in SoyJoy, which not only angers vegans, but makes them a bit paranoid. What could explain this bizarre contradiction, aside from a manufacturer’s conspiratorial vendetta against vegans? Is SoyJoy a malicious Trojan horse to trick vegans into buying and ingesting animal products? And worse, have vegans been eating other foods that they had innocently assumed were pure?
A near-vegan food is one of the worst abominations a vegan can imagine. A steak is evil, sure, but at least it isn’t fooling anybody. But what can excuse an otherwise vegan product with a small amount of animal product arbitrarily thrown in on a whim? Don’t these companies know there are people with principles in the world? It’s similar to why Jewish Kashrut laws consider pigs to be a symbol of hypocrisy and evil, and about as unkosher as it gets: it looks kosher… but it ain’t kosher.
To a vegan, putting a tiny squirt of milk in an otherwise vegan product is like hocking a loogie on a delicious plate of food just before you hand it to a starving man. Since everyone thinks as much about vegans as vegans do, adding a tiny dab of whey to the end of an ingredients list is an intentional jerk thing to do. Impostor bars like SoyJoy are mass-produced taunts aimed squarely at vegans.
What makes SoyJoy even worse is that it squeezes in every non-meat animal product it can imagine, seemingly in the hope that vegans will fail to check the ingredients, eat it, and consequently find themselves guilty of not just one count, but multiple counts of impurity ingestion.
The SoyJoy site has an “Ask the SoyJoy Dietitian” page. There is only one question vegans want to ask this fraud: “WTF?”
The vegan blog Healthy Diet had this to say about Soyjoy:
Is SoyJoy vegan? Nope. Really, not vegan? A soy bar? Why not? Two slightly un-informed booth workers proceeded to check the label for me, almost as if they had never done so before. SoyJoy is not vegan. They explained that this ‘healthy’ bar contained butter, eggs, whole milk and even cheese. Now is it just me or does that throw anyone else off? … These soy bars remind me a lot of the dairy-free veggie cheese that contains casein, aka milk-protein. Totally absurd.
What’s interesting about calling near-vegan products like soy cheese with milk protein absurd (and most vegans would) is that it contradicts the usual vegan notion that vegan food is for everyone. Here “Healthy Diet” seems to be saying, “Who the hell could find joy in soy but a vegan?”
And what could be more cruel than cheating vegans out of one of the few slight joys that they have left?
