blog.eliduke.com

i got an email today from meredith entitled “taco bell beans are vegan! HA!” with a link to a post on almostvegan.com. i read the post (and the subsequent comments) and found it to be quite an interesting discussion. the post itself was more of an extended comment-about-a-comment that the author got on an earlier post about the rice and bean burrito being vegan. that commentor said that the rice at taco bell has chicken stock in it. so, to settle it once and for all, the author went looking for some real info to try and stop all the speculation.

there was a pdf linked at the bottom of the post, but it looked old and weird and was hosted at some other site (shwatchdog.com). i continued reading the comments and then noticed one that said that although the beans may be vegan, the flour tortilla recipe had recently been updated and now included datem and was thus NOT vegan. if you don’t know what datem is, you should definitely click the above link and check it out; it’s pretty freaking gross (kinda makes you want to eat whole foods). datem falls into the same category as glycerides (as far as vegans are concerned) in that is can be made from vegetable or animal sources. foodfacts.com says that most datem is derived from vegetable origin, but some can be from animal sources. it continues on to say that most vegan and vegetarian groups recommend avoiding it.

to confirm that there actually IS datem in the tortillas, the commentor put a link to another taco bell ingredient list at the end of the comment, but the link was broken. i decided that it was about time that i did some research of my own.

i went to the taco bell website, clicked on “nutrition” in the upper right corner, scrolled down in the box that pops up on the right, and then clicked “ingredient statement.” that link directed me to the TACO BELL Ingredient Statement PDF that was hosted at the yum.com website for some reason. after a bit more research i found out that Yum! Brands, Inc. is the food service provider for A&W, KFC, LJS, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. so i figured that if taco bell is linking to them then it’s probably legit. but what did the ingredients list say?

the beans are vegan, the rice is not, the taco shells are vegan, the tortillas are not, the guacamole is vegan and so are cinnamon twists. that’s the gist of it. there are a few other things that might be worth double checking, but that’s what i’ve found.

so what does this mean? it means that now i know that taco bell can be there for me in a papa roach sorta situation. if i’m stuck somewhere and all i’ve got is a tb to tide me over, then i can order myself a hard shell taco with beans, veggies, gauc, and some hot sauce and at least i’m doing what i can to stay animal free. sure sure, i’m still eating hydrogenated oils and bleached flour and shit, but what else do you fucking want from me? huh?