Animal Products in food...

Now I am not a vegetarian. I enjoy meat and eat a fair amount of white meat and fish, and occasionally red meat. (However, I am planning on cutting down on bacon and salami products, because of their recently found links to cancers. Besides which, they are generally not all that good for you with all the salt and blah blah.)

However, a story about Masterfoods on the BBC website has enlightened me about the product 'rennet', which I had never heard of before and which has, quite honestly, horrified me. Basically, if you want to look it up on Wikipedia go ahead, but rennet is a product that occurs naturally in the stomachs of baby mammals. It helps to break down the mother's milk and basically turns milk into curds and whey inside the stomach so they can digest it. It is extracted commercially from the stomachs of young calves and is put into quite a few food products. Mainly dairy.

Masterfoods have announced that they will now be putting it into a lot of their products, a basic list is:
Bounty, Mars Bar, Twix, Minstrels, Maltesers, Mily Way, Snickers and all Masterfood icecreams, which I'm guessing is the Mars icecream type things.

For the BBC article all about it click HERE. Personally, I won't be able to enjoy a Mars bar ever again without thinking that Im eating a baby cow. Call me a hypocrite if you like because I'm not a veggie, and I know I am one, but I would never feel right eating veal or a meat I know came from a baby animal, so I can't see myself eating these things again. What is more annoying is that these products didn't previously contain rennet, it is a recent decision to include it.

That was quite an impressive rant for me, I hope you're not too bored. I'm off to the supermarket in a bit and am going to examine all the ingredients thoroughly! Of course, there is also gelatine but I don't see this as quite as bad as it is a genuine by-product (the animals are going to be killed anyway and presumable aren't babies) but I am going to try to avoid that as well, at least for a bit.