We have vegan parmesan, it;s just hard to find and ungodly expensive

Vegan parmesan is available by Redwoods in the UK. Don’t know about USA.

A definite one to be aware of is Parmesan.

“Parmesan/Parmigiano-Reggiano is an EU Protected Designation of Origin product and has to be made using calf rennet, so it’s definitely not suitable for vegetarians.”
http://www.vegsoc.org/page.aspx?pid=850

UK cheeses without rennet usually state the vegetarian status. Just go vegan, saves all the hassle and stops you being responsible for the cruelty of the dairy industry.

Really glad to see the cheese substitutes continuing to get better, cheaper and more widely available.
Soon it will be only a small minority that dines on rancid, coagulated, pus & blood filled cow titty secretions.

I never said cow based rennet was no longer used, it’s just not common at all in the US. Like I already said, I’m not defending cheese, I just don’t think this is the greatest offense. What went into foods never stopped me or really anyone I know from eating stuff. It;s the treatment of those involved in the production of whatever the case may be that’ll make people stop.

In my before days, there was a short stint in cheese making, me, my brother and his girlfriend at the time learned all about cheese and cheese making. Supermarket cheese in the US, is vegetarian, but from a vegan perspective, it’s sad to see people who choose to be vegetarian only to live off of really just cheese.

It is not entirely outdated. Animal rennet is still made use of, and even when the enzymes are not from the stomach lining of a calf, many other enzymes used to make cheese ARE animal derived.

Cheese is not defensible on a vegetarian diet, and this truth is one of many that will convince others to go vegan. While rennet may not be the biggest animal derived ingredient in “vegetarian” foods today, it still exists along with many others. For example, almost all lipases in cheese production are animal derived (pigs), palmitic acid, pepsin, and monostearates.

I am by no means defending cheese, but this misinformation has to stop. In the US, unless you’re buying hand made, crazy expensive cheese, and even then, not always, it’s made with vegetable derived rennet. It’s cheaper and hell of a lot easier to get a hold of. In Europe(I don;t know about the UK), the opposite is true. There is no cheese that isn’t made with rennet there.

I’m a big supporter of people choosing to no longer eat cheese, I just don;t want to see it done through out-dated, incorrect information.

Bile, Anyone?

Rennet, one of the key ingredients in cheese making, is often described as “the inner lining of a calf’s stomach”. Most people don’t take this to mean much, as they think, “well, yeah, so a calf had to die for my cheese; so what?”

Rennet is literally calf bile. Sounds tasty already, huh?

Every package of cheese that says “enzymes” in the ingredient list in the US is almost guaranteed to have calf bile (while slightly less likely in the UK). The fact that rennet is in nearly every cheese might make this unvegetarian in the eyes of most, seeing as it comes from the death of a baby cow. There are specialty dairy “cheeses” made for vegetarians that do not contain animal rennet, but you can be sure that if you’re going out for pizza at some local pizzeria (especially in the US), they aren’t using that special cheese. They are using the same bile everyone else is eating.

Let’s make this clear: Most cheese is not vegetarian.

But, hey, enjoy the food you say you could never give up. You could try to buy expensive vegetarian cheese for the rest of your life, still contributing to the torture and slaughter of dairy cows…

or you could try to go vegan. There is a myriad of different ways to get that cheezy flavour in the wide world of vegan food, such as store bought vegan shredded cheeses, bricks, squares, slices and more. There’s also nutritional yeast, which is cheaper than buying most any type of cheese you’ve bought before, and is versatile for so many different recipes. Vegan mac and cheeze will blow you away.

When you can have your “cheeze” and eat it too, going vegan seems like the smart, tasty, and bile-free choice.

What’s your take on the cheese problem?