The second reason vegans love processed food is conditioning. They learn to look for food items with labels that say “VEGAN” or “V,” and these can only be found on processed foods.
For a new vegan, these V labels are a helpful reference, a quick way to tell if a product is okay or not. “Look for the V,” seasoned vegans will tell the newbies. In a sea of immoral, animal-bloodied foods, these labels are like so many little lighthouses, pointing a vegan home.
Over time, these labels take on a power of their own. They stop simply drawing attention to the products they’re on, and become the draw themselves. The magic V is enough to make a vegan’s pulse rise and mouth salivate. It’s all a vegan needs to see before making a purchase decision.
“This product is okay to eat” evolves into “Eat me, vegan, and eat me now!” The label even makes the food taste better. For maximum gustatory pleasure, vegans should stare at the label while they eat (lingering on the vegan ingredients helps too). A vegan reading this entry and seeing all these labels would have drenched their keyboard in saliva by now.
I wonder how many vegans saw “V For Vendetta,” just because the poster made them hungry.
To understand the power of these labels, pretend that non-vegan food was labeled “Totally Fucking Badass,” and non-vegans believed it. A food labeled “vegan” feeds into the vegan identity the same way that a shirt or mug that says vegan does. It allows vegans to absorb themselves into the vegan whole, a throbbing mass of disciplined, healthy, animal-loving people who are going to save the world.
When they eat a food marked like this, it’s as if they are consuming veganism itself, and the concept becomes an even greater part of them (excluding the veganism that they shit out, I guess). Obviously, the more vegan they can be, the better.
Vegans, then, would rather eat a processed product that says “Vegan” on it than an unmarked, unprocessed, obviously vegan fruit or vegetable. In fact, vegans would burn mountains of fresh vegetables and fruits to get to a box of frozen food with this V on it.
Now why is something more vegan just because it says vegan? Obviously pure conditioning has a lot to do with it - the word vegan simply creates immediate reactions in the vegan mind. But company intent and a product’s awareness of its own veganism also have a lot to do with it. A company that labels its food vegan is considered especially “vegan friendly.” This company is aware that vegans exist, which most companies don’t seem to know, and even better, they are making a special effort to court them. They want vegans to love them, and vegans are happy to oblige.
A grocery store that only sold fruits and vegetables isn’t considered particularly vegan, because fruits and vegetables are for everybody. An important part of the vegan identity is separatism - vegans buy things that meat eaters don’t. So put some magic V’s on those shelves, call yourself a co-op, and brace yourself for the vegan flood.
It wouldn’t be a bad idea for grocery stores to habitually put V stickers on all their fruits and vegetables. They are so effective, there’s a good chance you could trick a vegan into eating a steak if you put that sticker on it. You could even warn them, “Listen, this is a rotting cow corpse, I killed the damn thing myself,” and they just wouldn’t believe you. “It has the V, I’m sure it’s fine,” they would say before happily chomping away.
Call it a V-Bone steak, Outback, and you’re in vegan business.
I once ate a young coconut in front of a vegan. “Aren’t you going to finish it?” the vegan asked. “I did,” I said, and I showed him the empty inside of the coconut. “What about that part?” the vegan asked, pointing to the fibrous white coating that covers the outside of the coconut shell. “That part isn’t edible,” I said. He looked confused for a moment, and then mumbled, “Coconuts are weird.”
This from someone who ate coconut-milk based vegan ice creams and vegan yogurts all the time. He had no direct experience with actual coconuts, only the processed versions with the V label prominently displayed. Coconuts aren’t so weird all liquefied and mixed with thickeners and sweeteners and packaged, it seems.
I’m not saying coconut ignorance is common in vegan circles. I ate coconuts all the time when I was one. But when given the choice, a vegan would rather buy coconut yogurt than an actual coconut, because the yogurt has the label, and thus is more vegan.
Yogurt is supposed to be a non-vegan food. So when someone makes a yogurt that vegans can eat, and markets it directly to them, that makes especially vegan. “This product violated nature to suit your morals,” the label essentially says. An apple is vegan no matter what, and even meat eaters will have one now and again. Only veganism could turn soybeans into yogurt. The fucking coconut tree doesn’t give a damn about vegans, or even know they exist. But Purely Decadent vegan coconut milk-based ice cream sprung directly out of veganism. That makes it vegan to its core.
Oh, wait, maybe it does come out of coconuts this way:
Vegans don’t care as much about products that happen to be vegan but aren’t marketed to them. PETA has a page about popular processed foods that happen to be vegan. But most of them are accidentally vegan. Though fine in a pinch, they don’t particularly excite vegans. Without that V, they almost might as well not be vegan at all. Only the V can give it that magical ethical glow.
To capitalize on this, many vegan restaurants try to make a green letter “V” prominent in their restaurant name. Some examples are: V Spot, V Bites, and Cafe V. Some vegans in San Francisco planned to make V Restaurant, dubbing it “the greenest restaurant in the world,” but apparently they couldn’t barter up enough starting capital.
Interestingly, the “Smart Choice” check mark that The New York Times reported is showing up on sugar-laden cereals - alerting parents to supposedly healthy foods like Fruit Loops - looks a lot like the vegan V.
I’m not sure the resemblance is intentional, but let’s hope it doesn’t dupe too many vegans into buying something with whey in it. That would not be a smart choice!
But if this check mark is able to conquer the subconscious buying impulses of the average shopper the way that the V plays vegans like so many harps from hell, then damn, this might be a good time to invest in check-marked breakfast cereal.
