Vegan's Chronicles

Dairy products dressed up in soy milk clothing

Ok, so my previous post was all about vegan soymilk drinks. Now let's talk about the soy drinks in Korea that are for some ridiculous reason, NOT vegan. It really doesn't make much sense to call something 'soy milk' and then have dairy milk or casein in it, but alas, omnivores aren't always logical... hehe.

Here is an example of ridiculously misleading marketing. They call this 'Soy Cappuccino,' but unfortunately, there is a good amount (try 40%) of dairy milk in it, and only 5% of soymilk. I could just smack them.

See for yourself.

Banana-flavored soymilk. Sounds and looks innocent right? Nope, there's dairy products in this.

I've also seen a pumpkin-flavored soy drink out there, but didn't get to photograph it. But it's not vegan either. Blast.

This 'Ah Chim Haet Ssal' is the only ricemilk drink that I have found in Korea, at convenience stores. Unfortunately, it is not vegan because there is casein in it, so I have never tasted it.

So what's the lesson of the day? To not trust every supposedly non-dairy milk beverage out on the market to be vegan-approved. You really have to look at the labels and ingredients list. I know it's hard and annoying, especially if you can't read Korean... But I would advise you to at least learn to recognize the characters for 'milk' which is '우유.' If you see this on any packaging, it most likely means that there are dairy products in it. Even if it is something like casein or whey, the ingredients list will have in brackets '(우유),' so you can immediately know that it is not vegan.