When I’m in the Asian shop, there are 10s if not 100s of different ramen noodle brands and flavors. Asian writing all over. Sometimes there’s English like “Vegetable”, “Curry”, “Tom Yum”, or other things half of which I do not recognise. WTF is “Vegetable flavor”? When they write “flavor”, it adds a degree of uncertainty of what you’re actually dealing with.

So I have to resort to reading the fine print. It’s a disaster. 3—4 different groups of ingredients broken down by the various packets. Few producers are kind enough to boldface the significant things like fish and shrimp. Then there’s “may contain shrimp”, which means it doesn’t actually contain shrimp, it was just processed in a place that has shrimp and some may get in accidentally.

Anyway, it’s a shit-show. Reading all the fine print in the shop is labor intensive and faulty. I get home and realise - oh shit, it actually contains shrimp. I missed that amid all the speed reading in a hurry. Fuck me.

Well, fuck them. New rules:

• For every animal product intentionally added to a package of ramen noodles, they must put a standard pictoral representation of that animal in a 8×8mm square on the front of the pkg.

No, vegan food producers do not need a mandate to mark their stuff vegan. Fuck meat. It’s the animal industry that must be burdened with mandatory labelling.