Sugar is declared "vegan" by the analyser, but not all sugar is vegan.

aleksejrs commented 4 years ago

What

https://www.peta.org/living/food/is-sugar-vegan/ says:
Cane sugar may have been refined by filtering through bone char and thus not be vegan.
Brown sugar is made from refined sugar.
"Beet and coconut sugar are never processed with bone char."
Some labels and companies mean that a sugar is not processed with bone char.

Ingredient analysis considers en:sugar and (some of) its kinds vegan: yes.

Steps to reproduce the behavior

Go to any product in https://world.openfoodfacts.org/ingredient/sugar
Click on Details of the analysis of the ingredients »
Search for en:sugar.
See that the ingredient is declared en:sugar - vegan: yes - vegetarian: yes.

Expected behavior

sugar: `vegan:en:maybe
coconut sugar: vegan:en:yes?
beet sugar: same as sugar? (see aleene's comment)

Number of products impacted

Tens or hundreds of thousands.

aleene commented 4 years ago

It seems a bit of a USA issue and then mainly cane sugar. For beet sugar they did use animal charcoal, but seems to be changed to other processes. So it is confusing.

So I agree sugar should be labelled as suspect vegan and vegetarian.

stephanegigandet commented 4 years ago

So I agree sugar should be labelled as suspect vegan and vegetarian.

Do you mean suspect vegan and suspect vegetarian? Or vegetarian and suspect vegan?

stephanegigandet commented 4 years ago

It's a delicate question. Sugar is present in a huge number of processed products, so making it "vegan unknown" (and "vegetarian unknown" ?) would make all those products "vegan unknown" / "vegetarian unknown". If the vast majority of products become "unknown", then that makes the ingredients analysis feature pretty much useless.

The ingredients analysis feature can only rely on the ingredient listed on the package. In particular it cannot account for the "technological auxilliaries" that are used to make the product but are not listed in the ingredients. (such as bone char for sugar).

For people who adhere to a strict vegan diet, for all processed foods, the ingredients analysis cannot be enough: they have to rely on the presence of a vegan label.

The ingredients analysis feature is more useful for people who want to avoid eating products made with milk, eggs, honey.

Given the context of how we do ingredients analysis, I think it makes sense to keep it based only on the ingredients themselves, and not on potential technological auxilliaries.

aleene commented 4 years ago

Many additives are already unknown due to auxiliaries, sugar is just another one. Unknown should really be unknown.

I do not think you should water down the ingredient analysis. What you can do based on ingredients will always be limited. Any vegan/vegetarian should know that. That is why you need producer assurances, or better certifications.

aleene commented 4 years ago

Anyway, I do not think we should decide what to include or not. It is up to the vegetarians/vegans to decide whether they want to buy a certain product. If it is accepted in the vegan/veg community that a certain product is suspect, we should follow that advice.

Som vegetarians will not eat the non-vegetarian products, but will eat the suspect products, Others do not even want to eat that. It is up to them to decide. We can only inform them of the info we have.

stephanegigandet commented 4 years ago

I do not think you should water down the ingredient analysis. What you can do based on ingredients will always be limited. Any vegan/vegetarian should know that. That is why you need producer assurances, or better certifications.

I can see your point of keeping sugar vegan and vegetarian as watering down ingredient analysis. My point is that making it unknown muddies ingredients analysis, as it will make most products suspect, at which point ingredients analysis becomes useless.

I think a good solution that does not force the choice in either way is to introduce a new level:

"Certified Vegan" --> the product has a Vegan label (or we somehow obtained assurance from the producer that it is without doubt Vegan). "Vegan" --> based on the analysis of the listed ingredients, the product contains only vegan ingredients, with the warning that we do not know if not vegan technical auxilliaries were used. "Maybe vegan" -> contains ingredients that can sometimes be derived from animals "Not vegan"

And in the site and the app, we display the "certified vegan" differently.

Then it's up to everyone to decide they should rely only on producer assurances and certifications, or if relying on ingredient analysis is ok for them.

github-actions[bot] commented 4 years ago

Stale issue message

github-actions[bot] commented 4 months ago

This issue has been open 90 days with no activity. Can you give it a little love by linking it to a parent issue, adding relevant labels and projets, creating a mockup if applicable, adding code pointers from https://github.com/openfoodfacts/openfoodfacts-server/blob/main/.github/labeler.yml, giving it a priority, editing the original issue to have a more comprehensive description… Thank you very much for your contribution to 🍊 Open Food Facts

openfoodfacts / openfoodfacts-server