VEGANGELICA

Hey, SATCHMO, I didn't even *know* there was such a thing as Rice Dream pumpkin pie rice cream!! Sigh. That's one disadvantage of being a vegan in Iowa, home of animal agriculture. We're always last to get the good vegan stuff. Our HyVee carries only two...yes...TWO flavors of Rice Cream frozen dessert only (I know, I know, the suffering): Vanilla and Carob Mint. When I first went to a vegan restaurant in Boston, it actually brought tears to my eyes! A whole *restaurant* where I could eat *anything* and didn't have to explain that chicken is meat and soup with broth from ham bones is not vegetarian, and marshmallows and jello are made with gelatin from pigs' skins.

GONE SUGARING...it's nice to know there's another vegan on MB. I hated cow's milk as a child, especially when I had some warm, pretty much straight from a cow. Milk always had a sour taste...and it was so *frothy*. Yech. If cow's milk was masked with chocolate I'd drink it, or sweetened with heftly spoonfuls of sugar that shimmered in the supersweet milk at the bottom of my Cheerios bowl! I actually used to eat Cheerios with orange juice a lot as my favorite snack.

And now I'm recalling how milk, if you heat it, gets that little membranous skin on top...kind of slimy, like mucus. Ugh. Then when I combined in the animal issues, etc., cow's milk was a lose-lose proposition for me. In contrast, vanilla flavored rice drink tastes to me like a thawed vanilla milkshake, and I very much like it. Even my father-in-law who doesn't understand veganism (veganism = reducing the suffering of sentient beings such as by not eating/using animal products) said Rice Dream vanilla rice beverage was good on his breakfast cereal! (No, I don't work for the RICE DREAM company. Really.)
--Erica