Animal Ingredients: A to Z

ANIMAL INGREDIENTS: A TO Z BY THE EG SMITH COLLECTIVE AK PRESS, 99 PAGES, $9.95

BESIDES SERVING as an excellent excuse for avoiding family gatherings, the vegan lifestyle is about more than food. Vegans don't "wear" animals (wool, fur, leather, down, etc.) and do their damnedest to avoid using animal products in any form. This is easer said than done. As Howard Lyman, the cattleman-turned-vegan, says: "To make our choices informed ones, we have to start with the facts."

Along comes the third edition of Animal Ingredients: A to Z to provide the facts along with some philosophical and nutritional context, thereby putting to rest the "where do you get your protein?" canard. But its true value and power lies in the 2000-plus ingredient listings—more than even the most seasoned vegan could imagine. While it doesn't require a ton of initiative to teach oneself to avoid casein, whey or gelatin, who knew the dirty little secret behind something called lipase? (It's an enzyme from the "stomach and tongue glands of calves, kids and lambs" found in some vitamin supplements.)

No matter where you stand on the animal exploitation meter, you might prefer to know that blood from slaughtered animals is used as adhesive in plywood, or that the keratin in your shampoo comes from "ground-up horns, hoofs, feathers, quills, and hair of various creatures." Go ahead and see if those aromatic folks behind the cosmetics counter know amylase is an enzyme "prepared from the pancreas of hogs." Musk may sound animal-derived, but how enticing is that over-priced perfume after discovering it's "obtained from the genitals of the North Asian small hornless deer"? Here's a personal favorite: A primary ingredient of many skin creams is polypeptides, or "waste matter eliminated by the fetus...derived from the uterus of slaughtered animals." Still want that beauty mask?

Pristane, guanine, palmitate—the indigestion-inducing inventory goes on and on, but there is a reprieve offered for postage stamps (no animal or fish glue) and maple syrup (rumors of pork fat are greatly exaggerated). This book won't be popular in your local tavern. Some beers contain gelatin, but it's wine that would send shudders down any veggie's spine: isinglass (internal membranes of fish bladders), gelatin, egg albumen and even ox blood are "added as fining agents." Cheers.

Animal Ingredients: A to Z is not designed to provoke paranoia. As Carol J. Adams explains in the preface: "In rejecting products arising from inhumane practices, we are in good company." From sugar and cotton from pre-Civil War slave states to California grapes harvested by exploited workers to clothing manufactured in sweatshops, we can vote with our shopping cart.