- Author: Maureen Ladley, UC Master Food Preserver of Solano/Yolo Counties
If you only have time to read this much: pectin is vegan-friendly.
I was having lunch at an outdoor venue with a lovely vegetarian friend. When we got around to all things canning, I told her how excited I was to try a sugar-free jam recipe using a particular pectin. "I cannot eat jams with pectin. I'm vegetarian," she mentioned. I was shocked. Having a smartphone, I immediately looked up the pectin in question. It's 100% plant-based. I showed her the ingredients, and she was surprised. She thought pectin and gelatin were similar and not vegetarian- or vegan-friendly. If my lovely, smart vegetarian friend was confused by pectin, I suspected others are, too.
Pectin is a thread-like vegetable-based carbohydrate that, when cooked, creates a cross-bond to form a gel. We endorse no products in the UC Master Food Preserver program, so the pectin brand I'm about to reference is for information only.
The pectin I looked up was Pomona's Universal Pectin®. According to their website, it is 100% citrus pectin. The pectin is extracted from the dried peel of lemon, lime and orange after the fruit has been juiced and the oil has been pressed out of the peel. The product is vegan, gluten-free and GMO-free. This particular brand of pectin is set using calcium water; instructions are included in the package. With Sure-Jell Powdered Pectin® and Ball Powdered Pectin®, the ingredients are dextrose, citric acid (assists gel) and fruit pectin.
Commercially packaged pectin comes in liquid or powdered form. Each type has particular uses and cannot be substituted for each other. Recipes typically call out what type of pectin to use and how to use it. Here is an example of a jam using powdered pectin from the UC ANR (University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources) Recipe Library:
Strawberry Jam, using powdered pectin: https://ucanr.edu/sites/camasterfoodpreservers/files/334998.pdf
If Solano/Yolo is your local county, contact us online by following this link: https://surveys.ucanr.edu/survey.cfm?surveynumber=30140.
Happy canning!
For more information about the UC Master Food Preserver Program, including the Food Preservation Video Library, visit mfp.ucanr.edu.
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Many vegetarians choose to eat an animal-free diet because they believe cows, hogs, chickens and goats have the same desire for life as humans. An op-ed in the New York Times might give these vegetarian eaters pause. The author, Natalie Angier, suggests that vegetables have feelings, too.
To support her argument, Angier spoke to UC Riverside genetics professor Linda Walling. Walling said plants can’t run away from a threat, but they are good at avoiding being eaten. But she wasn't talking about their ability to avoid being eaten by humans.
"It’s an unusual situation where insects can overcome (the plant's) defenses," Walling was quoted in the story. After an insect's first bite, specialized cells on the plant’s surface release chemicals to irritate the predator or sticky sap to entrap it. Genes in the plant’s DNA are activated to wage systemwide chemical warfare, the plant’s version of an immune response.
A different professor, Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin, spoke more directly to plants' human-like traits.
"They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk (through chemical signals). These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals,” Hilker was quoted in the story.
So does that make vegetarians no more compassionate than carnivores?
Perhaps Tim Carmen of the Washington City Paper blog Young and Hungry said it best when he commented on the New York Times article.
"The answer, I think, is not to stop eating everything because everything has a right to live and we don’t have a right to eat them. The answer is to better understand our role in the greater ecosystem called Earth," Carmen wrote.