30 Day Vegan

[Phishfan]

Vegetables are what my food eats before it becomes my food...

Along the same lines; I love salad, it's what let's me know the rest of my food is coming.

[Cathal]

Wow, congrats on the effort! I think I could be persuaded into doing the vegetarian thing if I was shown one of those pita videos that detail how the slaughterhouses treat the animals. If I actually thought about what I was eating, I don't think I could continue to eat meat, even though I really enjoy it. I take on the "ignorance is bliss" attitude when it comes to eating meat. Sad but true.

Good luck if you ever decide to make the vegan thing a full time gig! I don't think it will ever be for me though

In my undergraduate class, which, I think was Criminal Justice, a friend of the teacher came in who happened to have one of those slaughterhouse PETA videos. I'm not sure why he came, since it had nothing to do with the class, but at the end of it, some guy and I were thinking the same thing.... let's go get some Whoppers.

[Frimp]

Frimp likes his steak bloody and rare
With the cow still mooing. He don't care.
Stroke digs barbeque all over his pork.
He devours that piggy with his knife and fork.

Now there's a lynch gang, Led by KD Lang
She says eat veggies instead.
Now if she denys me the right,
my beef eating buddies will be READY TO FIGHT

Tofu and bean sprouts are there for the pickin'
But if you ask me it don't TASTE LIKE CHICKEN
She's a witch with a mission and no one can stop her
In the land of the free and the HOME OF THE WHOPPER

I want pork, I want beef, I want gravy.
I want blood dripping down my chin
Bring me a double cheeseburger. Hold the fries, extra bacon
Just give me something hot that was alive an hour ago and
let me put it between 2 HOT STEAMING BUNS!!!

[Sunstroke]

Bravo on the carnivorous tuneage there, Frimp...first time I've ever been immortalized for my pig-devouring habits.

[janetmschulte]

I think you mean "PETA".   "Pita" is what you put the animals in when you're eating them.

I suppose it was a Freudian slip!

[Guru-In-Vegas]

That's incorrect.

Rennet is complex of enzymes produced in the stomach lining of mammals.

There are many methods of producing these enzymes, which (btw) constitute less than 0.1% of the final cheese.

One of these methods, likely the one your research lead you to, is taking the freeze-dried stomachs of calves and chemically and mechanically extracting the enzymes. While perhaps not palatable to some vegetarians, it's certainly not cut and dried (haha).

MOST cheese today, especially domestic cheese (and all kosher cheese), uses rennet from non-animal sources, mainly produced by specific molds or fungi.

According to the government, about 60% of domestic hard cheese was made with genetically engineered chymosin in 1999. The number today is undoubtedly MUCH higher. This specific source of this is typically a genetically engineered strain of the common fungus Aspergillus niger.

There are many other sources of non-animal rennet (or rennet substitutes), so the amount of hard cheese produced domestically from animal-rennet in 1999 was SIGNIFICANTLY below 40%.

Of course, in an irony of ironies, the "genetic engineering / GM foods are bad" lobby consists, in my own personal non-scientific experience, mostly of vegans and vegetarians. So, no using genetic engineering to get that fungus to produce chymosin, because, well, that's just WRONG.

I stand corrected!  I knew it was the enzymes that is used but I thought it was found in the animal's stomach lining therefore the lining itself was used.  Either way, I thought the percentage of rennet use in cheese was higher because other methods proved to be much more expensive.