food adventure (I'm not a vegetarian but ...)

I, half asleep at the grocery cart, accidently bought the super soft silken tofu and needed to use it.
So I made a tofu pumpkin pie:

This receipe is ganked from VegWeb.

1 can (16oz) pureed pumpkin
3/4 cp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cloves
10-12 oz silken/soft tofu (blended until smooth)
1 pie shell (I used graham cracker crust)

Preheat oven 425F
Use mixer to combine pumpkin and sugar.
Add salt, spices, and blended tofu.
Mix.
Pour into pie shell
Bake 15 min.
lower heat to 350F
bake 40 min
Chill. Serve.

It firms up nicer if you chill it overnight.

It's nice and pumpkiny, easy easy easy to make, has the benefits of eating tofu without the feeling that you are eating tofu, and no animals will be harmed or exploited in its making and baking.

(Provided that the pie crust uses no buttter or non-vegan shortening or non vegan margarine - {most commercial margarines have whey and thus are not vegan.} and the sugar is vegan.)

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This is the food for thought part. It might gross you out.
Me, I'm fascinated.

Is refined sugar vegan?

According to VegFamily who asked PETA about this one and the Canadian Sugar Institute (Who unlike wanks like the Sugar Association and some sugar companies are the coolest for giving people the straight dope on sugar processing.) During processing, sugar is filtered to take out inorganic compounds (that you might not want to be eating) and crap that would color the sugar. Beet sugar is filtered through diatomaceous earth - the fossilized shells of ancient single-celled marine creatures. *ew*
Cane sugar is commonly filtered through bone char - the dried purified bones of cows *ew ew* ( The bone char apparently works really well.) This very old Purifymind article has a great bit about corporate claims that the bones are imported and come from cows that have died of natural causes.


The end product of these processes is pure sugar. No animal bits of any kind remain.

Some companies use ion exchange or granular carbon which has a wood or coal base in the filtering process.
(coal - dried fossilized and compressed bits of prehistoric plant and dinosaur. *ew?*)

If this repulses you, VegFamily has a list of sugar companies that do or do not use the bone char process.

Suffice it to say it must be so difficult to be a committed vegan. People are sneaking the use of animal products at you at every turn, even into your Snickers bar.

And is the use of a fossilized animal product also considered unethical? They died before humans roamed the earth ....