My vegan friend told me that she didn’t eat sugar because it contained animal products - she claimed it was processed through charcoal made of cow bones. I sometimes eat animal products (though not meat), but this struck me as something I would have heard about. She says gelatin is animal bones as well, which I’ve heard but not been sure about. Both of these kind of bother me, but the sugar really grosses me out. Can someone tell me this is not true? I’ve been putting honey in my coffee and cereal for a few days now and it doesn’t taste so good.
Well, here’s what Cecil has to say about gelatin.
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_103.html
As for sugar, well, I dunno. But I know gelatin.
JMCJ
Just confirming that my ass is, in fact, the wisest part of my body.
Gelatin is indeed made from animals – bones, skin, hooves, etc.
Here’s what Grolier’s says about sugar refiniing:
Sugarcane requires a warm, moist climate for cultivation. It is grown from sections of cane stalk, each containing a bud. After 9 to 36 months of growth the cane attains heights of 3-4.5 m (10-15 ft). At harvest, the cane is cut off close to the ground by machinery or manually with a machete.
The cane stalks are then stripped of leaves and transported to a sugar mill. There they are crushed, shredded, and passed through a series of heavy rollers under great pressure to extract the cane juice. The remaining solid material, called bagasse, may be used as a fuel by the mill or may be processed into paper or wallboard. The cane juice is clarified and then concentrated by boiling. The resultant thick syrup, called massecuite, is fed into a centrifuge having a perforated basket at its center. When the centrifuge is spun, some of the syrup is crystallized and retained in the basket, while the remaining syrup is thrown to the periphery. This process is repeated once or twice to extract additional sugar crystals. The residue is a dark, odorous syrup called blackstrap molasses.
At this stage the sugar crystals are known as raw cane sugar and are light brown because they are coated with a thin film of molasses. The refining process is interrupted at this point, because raw sugar is an economical form in which to ship sugar in bulk.
Nearly all raw sugar is transported to refineries by oceangoing vessels, and it is for this reason that major refineries are located at seaports. At the refinery, the raw sugar is washed to remove the molasses and is dissolved into a water syrup. After the syrup is filtered to remove impurities and discolorants, the sugar is crystallized by boiling in vacuum pans, washing, and centrifuging. The crystallization process is repeated as long as extractable sugar remains in the syrup. The end product is the familiar granulated white sugar, which is dried, screened, and packaged.
End quote. No mention of charcoal. Sounds like your friend has it very wrong.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
Read “Sundials” in the new issue of Aboriginal Science Fiction. www.sff.net/people/rothman
I can imagine that this story arose to bolster the general claim pushed by vegans and the like that refined sugar is somehow unhealthy. Well, it’s certainly not being processed that makes them unhealthy. But a lot of people believe it.
You can always go with Sweet ‘n’ Low. Yeah, yeah… it increases your chances for contracting cancer. But think of all the brownie points you’ll get when you get to doggie heaven.
Laugh and the world laughs with you. Smilie and you smilie alone (with my contempt). – missdavis
Sounds like your friend is ready for a subscription to “Vegetarian Times.”
Spreading UL’s that are not quite true is a poor way to establish credence in your chosen lifestyle.
Lactose is a sugar that is derived from milk. Maybe that’s what your friend was thinking of when she heard about cow by-product sugar.
Good 'ol sucrose however, is an all natural product extracted from cane and to a lesser extent comercially, beets.
Though we no longer grow sugar on my island, we did for decades. I got a good part of my training as a pipefitter working in sugar refineries. I know every piece of equipment in one well. There is no cow bone charcoal processing phase. In fact there is no charcoal processing in the process whatsoever.
That is not to say there never has been such a phase. At a point in processing, the syrup is passed through ion exchange towers to decolorize it. It is possible that bone charcoal was once used for this process.
I can only swear to the fact that I have never seen machinery for it. (and refineries dont throw out old equipment, they pipe around it, or just haul it out back) So It’s never been used in my lifetime. At least not in this country.
So there you have it. I believe EvilGhandi. I’ll take Occam’s razor every time. On another note, can you even make charcoal out of cow bones? Is there that much carbon in cow bones. I would think there’s plenty of cheap,wood based charcoal.
Anyway, a much worst problem for vegans is the problem with plastic products. They are made out of dinosaurs you know.
Sugar, itself, whether from Cane or Beets is all Vegetable.
Your friend may also have a problem with honey, Scoop. I don’t know how honey is processed (I don’t think that it is processed much) but it does involve the “exploitation” of bees. I have no idea how the bees feel about it.
The easiest way to resolve the sugar question is to look at a bag of sugar and see if it says “parve” or “pareve”. Under Jewish law, this means (I think; can someone confirm this?) that it doesn’t contain any animal products, so it can be eaten with either meat or milk without being unkosher.
Never attribute to malice anything that can be attributed to stupidity.
– Unknown
It’s true, it’s all true. The poor little sugars are raised from infancy in horrible conditions, kept confined, unable to roam the fields freely. These sugar ranches are cramped, poorly lit, and there is very little reading material provided.
At maturity, many of the sugars are horribly forced into unnatural cube-like shapes, before being slaughtered for market.
Even worse, many of the young sugars are forcibly separated from their mothers at an early age, and weaned to an all artificial sweetener diet. These poor creatures are confined in little pink or blue paper wrappings (the pink and blue are to distinguish the males from females) before being callously slaughtered for human consumption.
And although the sugar companies claim that the slaughter of the sugars is done humanely, in fact nasty chopping instruments are still sometimes used.
If you want to help fight this dreadful mistreatment of the little sugars, you can send money to Stop the Uncontrolled Corrupt Killing of Entire Sugars (SUCKER) organization, care of this website.
Or there are agencies that will help you adopt a sugar as a pet, to save it from slaughter.
Oh, wait, in my prior response, I hadn’t read the question carefully. The question is: Is sugar vegetarian?
The answer is that, in captivity, sugar are raised on an all vegetarian diet. In the wild, of course, some sugar are carnivorous.
CatInHat writes:
More or less; this depends on whether we mean “animal == mammal” or not. Kosher fish are considered pareve.
I note that the term “pareve” may not be used. For instance, I have a box of sugar that is labelled with the circle-K (of Kashrus Laboratories). The unqualified symbol means that the product is kosher and pareve (the sugar is actually marked (K) P – but that means that the sugar is suitable for Pesah (Passover)); a “(K) D” would mean it is kosher, but dairy. The Orthodox Union (OU; their symbol is circle-U) also uses an unqualified endsorsement for pareve products, and qualifies it for meat and dairy.
It is often said that “anything is possible”. In fact, very few things are possible, and most of them have already happened.
Thanks, Akatsukami. It feels good to be right sometimes! 
Vegetarians are interesting. They won’t eat meat but oral sex is okay. They eat vegetables but won’t eat sugar. Won’t eat cows, but can wear them.
1sug•ar "shu-ger\ noun [ME sugre, sucre, fr. MF sucre, fr. ML zuccarum, fr. OIt zucchero, fr. Ar sukkar, fr. Per shakar, fr. Skt sarkara; akin to Skt sarkara pebble — more at crocodile] (14c)
1 a : a sweet crystallizable material that consists wholly or essentially of sucrose, is colorless or white when pure tending to brown when less refined, is obtained commercially from sugarcane or sugar beet and less extensively from sorghum, maples, and palms, and is important as a source of dietary carbohydrate and as a sweetener and preservative of other foods
b : any of various water-soluble compounds that vary widely in sweetness and include the oligosaccharides (as sucrose)
2
Thanks for the info. My friend, I just found out, does have a problem with the exploitation (her word) of bees in the making of honey, but I’m running out of patience. Every time I eat around her she points out that some chemical in the food is made from animals. At this point, I’m just eating what I did before I met her. There’s really only so much you can do. But I will eat sugar again.
I definitely wouldn’t be inviting that friend to any dinner parties. 
Do bees really mind sharing their honey? Why do they make so much extra?
I gotta steal that bit.
Handy, have you ever heard the song Mary Moon? The chorus ends with “she don’t eat meat, but she sure like the bone.” I had an ovo-lacto vegitarian friend who agreed that it described her pretty well. You never heard me complain about the inconsitency.
My Jesus fish can beat up your Dawrin fish but forgives it instead.
CKDext: Hee-hee! That was sweet!
"Handy, have you ever heard the song Mary Moon? The chorus ends with
“she don’t eat meat, but she sure like the bone.”
No, but if you hum a few bars Ill pretend I did. Sounds about right…
People are meat.