David Mintz: The Man Behind Tofutti

While looking around for tempeh recipes online earlier this morning, I ended up stumbling upon an article about David Mintz, the creator of Tofutti dairy-free products. Now the company's CEO and director (and supposedly earning somewhere around $800,000 a year), Mintz has definitely come far from his more simple beginnings as a delicatessen owner. Curiously enough, what drove Mintz to create the line was anything but a concern for animal sentience:

Recognizing a needy market. An observant Jew, Mintz was aware that many Jews would dearly love to eat ice cream (milchig) for dessert after a meal that includes meat (fleishig) — something forbidden by Jewish law. Good-tasting pseudo-ice cream without milk would do nicely. Besides, a great many people (30 to 60 million Americans, according to various estimates) are allergic to milk products. Their stomachs cannot break down the lactose in milk, so they get bellyaches and other abdominal problems. Indeed, many people, as they grow older, become somewhat lactose intolerant — including Mintz himself.

In fact, the article pretty much limits itself to focusing on the religious reasons surrounding Mintz's creation of Tofutti, as well as on how the products benefit those who are lactose-intolerant. There's not a single mention of vegetarianism or veganism. What's even more interesting is that Mintz himself admits in the article that fish is his favourite food and that one of his hobbies is raising Japanese koi.

I hopped over to the Tofutti website to read its origins story there and pretty much found more of the same, as it was explained how Mintz initially sought to provide dairy-free substitutes for his New York delicatessen for his customers who kept kosher. Although veganism is mentioned in passing in the company website's FAQs, the focus on the website is kept on the religious reasons the products are dairy-free (as well as on the fact that they're cholesterol-free -- a health bonus). Furthermore, it's explained that many Tofutti products aren't, in fact, vegan. All of their frozen food entrées and all of their cookies contain eggs, plus one of their Better Than Cream Cheese varieties isn't even vegetarian, but contains smoked salmon.

It was interesting for me to read about this since, aside from their more straightforward dairy substitutes, Tofutti products aren't widely available in stores in my area. Plus, I don't generally seek them out since I avoid soy products that aren't organic, since most soy produced in North America is GMO unless labelled otherwise. It's funny that a company that provides foods widely-enjoyed by so many vegans and vegetarians came to do so more or less accidentally in a way that had nothing to do with animal ethics.

The Ethicurean and rBGH

I love The Ethicurean. It's not a vegetarian blog, but it's one of my favourite blogs out there now dealing with the ethics of consumption, both in terms of the actual information that's presented, as well as how it's presented . There are different contributors and they discuss topics such as organic farming, food labelling, animal welfare, changes in legislation, the biotech industry, etc. It's definitely worth bookmarking if any of these areas are of concern to you.

Someone posted an open letter to Monsanto there yesterday, listing off the small roadblocks they've been hitting during the lobbying they've been doing in the US to prevent dairy farmers or producers from labelling their milk rBGH-free (rBGH or recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone is manufactured by Monsanto and marketed under the name POSILAC). I was grinning from ear to ear reading it. Monsanto's take on it is that having some dairy products labelled rBGH-free would invariably lead consumers to believe that there's something wrong with it, which would in turn lead to consumers avoiding dairy products coming from cows who've been injected with it.

The Organic Consumers' Association website has a section dealing with the rBGH issue, featuring everything from news stories about it to lists of rBGH-free producers and companies. They also spell out all of the reasons its usage ranges from problematic to outright dangerous, both to cows, as well as to the humans who consume the dairy products coming from cows injected with it.

Where soy milk comes from (and musings about vegan yogurt)

The soy controversy came up in conversation last night with a mostly-vegan friend who's decided to cut all soy products from his diet. We were discussing soy- and dairy-free alternatives to soy milk, and speculating about the existence of soy- and dairy-free yogurt. It seems that the only soy- and dairy-free yogurt on the market right now is something called Ricera, which is made from organic brown rice. It's high in protein, cholesterol and trans-fat free, and fortified with Vitamins A and D, as well as with calcium. According to their website, they got off to a rocky start when the Vitamin D source they used was found to be D3, which is animal-derived. They've since rectified the problem and are using D2, which is vegetable-derived.

All nutritional questions aside, however -- is it tasty? I've never seen it in Canada, but a friend has mentioned that it's available at Whole Foods. A few Google searches led me to some sad reviews of the product, at least one using the word "barf". As more and more people avoiding dairy in their diets (either from lactose-intolerance, concerns over the use of hormones in the dairy industry, or for ethical reasons) become concerned about the purported issues with soy, it probably won't be long until other dairy- and soy-free brands of yogurt pop up on store shelves.