Sniffing out the secret meat products

THE long list of foods which look like they should be vegetarian but quietly aren't could fill a whole bundle of notepads.

It feels like one area where we haven't made much progress even as meat-free diets have become more and more common.

In terms of veggie ranges in supermarkets and the choice when eating out it's light and day compared with when I chucked in the chicken nuggets in the mid-1990s.

Back then my local pub's only concession was a chip butty and during one holiday to a hotel in the Lake District I had to settle for an omelette three nights on the trot.

I shudder to think what their vegan option would have been, other than perhaps the offer of a spade and directions to a local farmer's potato field.

The frozen food section could be equally unimaginative, with grim offerings like garlic grills - dry as grave dirt - and ploughman's pasties, which could have been exhumed from said dirt.

This feels like a distant past in an age when even the likes of KFC has realised a corn-on-the-cob isn't really cutting it and has started to offer a plant-based burger (albeit one that looks suspiciously like a garlic grill in a bun).

Talking to a friend the other day, it did occur to me that the rapid growth in vegetarianism has not seen a similar effort to try and wean our food supply chains off what we might call stealth meat products.

Or perhaps more importantly just give the people the information they need.

Scroll many ingredients lists and you start to find that everything from orangeade to Worcester sauce, and cereals to jelly beans, is hiding something sinister.

The first thing you'll tend to notice is none of these products will explicitly say they're not suitable for vegetarians, so usually your first warning is the fact that the distinctive green 'v' is nowhere to be seen.

When you delve deeper you'll often find the seemingly innocuous ingredients you learn to avoid. Gelatine, rennet, cochineal and isinglass might sound like starter Pokemon but for all of them you should read animal parts. I won't go into all the gruesome details here, but natural colouring can often be a euphemism for crushed bugs...

Trying to keep on top of what's safe and what isn't is made harder as recipes and suppliers are forever changing. Some food giants go as far as to adopt a policy of practised ambiguity. While some do their best to keep regular checklists online, others simply don't say.

Against this backdrop it's understandably hard to get answers by the time you're in the shop itself. The number of times I've had to watch an ice cream vendor pore over an antique-looking allergens list retrieved  from beneath the counter scarcely bares thinking about.

Part of the problem with dairy of course is that sellers who are rather pleased to know the difference between vegans and veggies will be adamant that a chocolate cone is fine for the second group. It's just milk and cream innit? 

At which point you realise that trying to launch into a long debate on animal-derived whey is probably not worth it and settle for something safe like a can of pop (but probably not orange pop!)

To be fair most of the people are always helpful and it's often easier if you're dealing with someone who makes their own food. Blessed are the cheesemakers who realise rennet isn't in fact a character from 80s sitcom Allo Allo.

You always get the odd idiot who clearly thinks questions about faddy food trends are beneath them. I remember one especially obnoxious shop owner in Devon whose response to my question was something to the tune of 'what you won't know won't hurt you'. I can only hope he doesn't have the same stance towards those with peanut allergies...

His comments nonetheless cut to the anxiety I think a lot of vegetarians feel that their queries about food colouring and emulsifiers can come across as petty.

Speaking personally I'm fairly sanguine about the fact that there's plenty of things that will remain off the menu for as long as vegetarians remain a small, albeit growing, group. It would be unreasonable to expect businesses to impose wholesale changes to recipes.

But for those who have made a choice to avoid these products, getting easy information from packets or traders shouldn't be the challenge it is at the minute.