I just encountered the Snickers Feast commercials for the first time. This is possibly the oddest of them:
But they're all strangely absorbing. Too bad I'll never get to eat a Snickers again; turns out that nougat contains (non-humane) gelatin.
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Ha ha, I must be getting dyslexic, when I first read the final sentence I thought you said it contains non-human gelatin.
The garbage can version is awesome.
The gelatin thing is odd...
Ever since I saw "Blood Nougat", I haven't been able to eat Snickers either.
On a more serious note, how does one go about properly vetting food? I guess most people concerned with such things just avoid packaged foods altogether, but is there a website that seperates the wheat from the chaff?
Snickers bars have no gelatin. Check the ingredient label. They wouldn't be certified as Kosher by the Orthodox Union if they did...
The ingredients in a Snickers Bar are:
milk chocolate (sugar, cocoa butter, chocolate, lactose, skim milk, milkfat, soy lecithin, artificial flavor), peanuts, corn syrup, sugar, skim milk, butter, milkfat, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, lactose, salt, egg whites, artificial flavor.
http://global.mms.com/cai/snickers/faq.html
Note the conspicuous absence of gelatin, which is not an ingredient in nougat in any case (it's either sugar-based or egg-based, depending on the type). You can even read about the process they use to make nougat (an industrial version of a process used in home kitchens for generations).
So long as one has no problems with milk and eggs, from a dietary perspective, it would seem a Snickers bar is unobjectionable on the basis of including animal products.
Gelatin is non-humane? Huh...you learn something new everyday.
Aaron, I'm not sure whether there is a good humane meat list for vetting purposes but I suspect that Howard's point about Snickers being OU-certified Kosher makes that a rough-and-ready proxy. Anything dairy or pareve would be meat-free and any packaged foods containing meat could reasonably be assumed to contain non-humane meat. Unfortunately Kosher meat does not imply humane meat, although there is a growing movement within Orthodox Jewry arguing that the laws of Kashrut should be extended to include more than just the method of slaughter. There is some precedent for this, e.g., some Jews will not wear leather on Yom Kippur out of respect for the animal.
As Mr. Burns said re: jello: "It's made with hooves, you know!"
Megan, did you see this series from The Charlotte Observer?
Thanks for the response, MC. It seems like the most motivated groups are the ones that would end meat eating altogether, as opposed to getting the word out on who is and isn't humane in their practices.
I don't watch TV much, and there's only one recent ad I remember - and that's because the advertisers certainly didn't intend the message I got from it:
Two men and a dog are in a horse-drawn wagon. (I've no idea why.) A truck marked _____ Lite Beer draws up alongside. The dog jumps from the wagon into the truck. Obviously, he's found something better.
So, to me, this implies, "_____ Lite. Better than drinking out of the toilet."
Does that mean encapsulated medication is out?
Seriously, who told you that nougat contains gelatin? Probably the people who told you that gelatin is made from hooves. You will, however, have to give up non-artisanal marshmallows, although I know of a traditional producer in Spokane that will ship nationwide.
non-artisanal marshamallows?
I despair of the West that we can afford to feed people artisanal marshmallows. Talk about decadence.
Speak for yourself Michael. Me, I insist that all my marshmallows be lovingly handcrafted by starving and barefooted Marshmallow Artisans who live in the Pacific Northwest. The real trick is getting the occasional shipment of handcrafted artisanal rice krispies from my rice krispie artisan contacts (it's a small, close-knit group of Buddhist monks who live in a monastery in Laos), so that (together with the artisanal marshmallows) I can make my rice krispie treats with properly-snooty ingredients.