A vegan cheese was selected to win an industry award. Then the industry found out

[anon94804983]

Lovely!

[PPK]

Oh my word - you just gave me flashbacks to this masterpiece short film. I was at the Annecy Animation Festival in - I think - 1999. Our company was doing a lot of work with Aardman at the time, and they were there to showcase Chicken Run.

I believe this animator was also working with our kit - so we could use the short in demonstrations - and this is as hilarious as it is weird :

Yaourts mystiques (2000)

25 years ago and I can still remember parts of the dialogue…

[Mister44]

I mean, you had that story of someone selling “Gluten Free donuts”, only for people to figure out there were just Dunkin Donuts.

But no - as much as I may disagree with vegans, it would be unethical to feed them (the judges) real cheese with out them knowing.

[mallyboon]

-Capitalism ruins everything. Because we’ve incentivized a world where big is better, the only way smaller/more sustainable business (in this case vegan or dairy-based artisanal cheese) can survive is by trying to eat each other and catering to the well-heeled.

-It’s also funny some of the hills we’ll choose to die on. I think everyone, deep down, has an issue that’s ultimately meaningless that they feel passionately about. For some people it’s the Oxford comma, for others it’s what defines “real” cheese.

[jerwin]

@mallyboon

Nothing in the Good Food competition guide seemed to imply that a cheese needed to be made from milk - it just had to taste like cheese apparently. They were retroactively disqualified because they used to use kokum oil, which hasn’t been assessed by the FDA as safe for human consumption. The cheese that won didn’t even use this ingredient, according to Climax.

the present guidelines say,among other things

• Made by the entrant’s own company, with milk from animals raised using good animal husbandry* with access to the outdoors.

https://goodfoodfdn.org/awards/categories/cheese/

so arguably, if a cheese manufacturer skips the animals entirely, they aren’t participating in the process this award is meant to promote.

“As a recipient of this prize, can you share your knowledge of how to graze your animals?”
“I’m sorry, I’m don’t understand the question. Funny story, though, I was inspired by Dennis Villeneuve’s Bladerunner 2047 to get into this business.”

[anon11942186]

In the reboing of this article there is this statement.

reportedly due to issues around one of the ingredients (kokum butter) not having GRAS certification.

I’ll double post myself over here on this thread

I think this statement is a lot more important than the maker implies. As I understand it, you can’t just sell things as food (in the US) without a GRAS assesment (or other safe dosing data). It’s an FDA requirment.

That would seem to be a pretty legitimate reason to hold off on awarding even if it was only discovered after an unimpressed competitor had to look really hard to find it?

[anon67050589]

Since you seem to be all over this subject, you’ve probably already read that the kokum butter was in a previous/earlier version and not in the version submitted to the contest.