https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/lead-and-cadmium-in-dark-chocolate-a8480295550/

The researchers found that cacao plants take up cadmium from the soil, with the metal accumulating in cacao beans as the tree grows. That’s similar to how heavy metals contaminate some other foods.

But lead seems to get into cacao after beans are harvested. The researchers found that the metal was typically on the outer shell of the cocoa bean, not in the bean itself. Moreover, lead levels were low soon after beans were picked and removed from pods but increased as beans dried in the sun for days. During that time, lead-filled dust and dirt accumulated on the beans. “We collected beans on the ground that were heavily loaded with lead on the outer shell,” DiBartolomeis says.

Because of the different ways that cadmium and lead get into chocolate, addressing the contamination requires different solutions.

For lead, that will mean changes in harvesting and manufacturing practices, says Danielle Fugere, president of As You Sow. Such practices could include minimizing soil contact with beans as they lie in the sun, and drying beans on tables or clean tarps away from roads or with protective covers, so lead-contaminated dust won’t land on them. Another option is finding ways to remove metal contaminants when beans are cleaned at factories, Fugere says.

Solving for cadmium is trickier, though it is possible, DiBartolomeis says. Carefully breeding or genetically engineering plants to take up less of the heavy metal could help, though that could take several years. Other potential options include replacing older cacao trees with younger ones, because cadmium levels tend to increase as the plants get older, and removing or treating soil known to be contaminated with cadmium.

Olive oil can be made at home by crushing fresh olives, similar to peanut oil, and sunflower oil, and probably several other plant oils I haven’t looked up.

Hey, glad you want to be a considerate, conscientious vegan! You won’t upset anyone as long as you follow these simple rules:

1. Never admit that you are vegan
2. Never talk about veganism
3. When people are talking about meat, eagerly participate
4. Do not eat visibly vegan food in public
5. If offered meat or cheese, eat it without protest
6. Do not cook vegan food if serving others
7. When you see a cow, remark out loud how you want to eat it

That’s about all you need to know to be one of the Good Vegans. Hope this helps!

pretentious

this is almost year old news

the thing about souls games is that people on the internet insist that the only REAL way to play them is through extra difficult self-imposed challenge runs (summons? resin? pyromancy? you didn’t beat the game)

ignore that and you can temper the difficulty down a lot, though you’ll likely still need a good amount of patience and perseverance, especially if it’s your first time playing

I reject the premise of your question.

Imagine being so devoid of soul and spirit you turn your OS into kubernetes

Graphics cards totally scream when they die too, the smell warns their symbiotic sysadmins to turn off the power

And don’t even get me started on how chalkboards scream when you scratch them, why do vegans not talk about this cruelty

Weird how every time veganism comes up everyone is suddenly deathly allergic to anything that doesn’t scream when it dies

Not existing, or spending your entire short life “happily” being literal livestock existing only to have products extracted from you on the 0.00001% of farms that both don’t abuse their animals (more than is “necessary” for livestock farming) and stimulate them beyond dropping them in a field where they can catch a glimpse of a car every so often.

Hmm hmm hmm. What a conundrum.

Hold on, let me get my B12 deficient brain around this with a basic hypothetical example…

100 cows are killed each year at an evil factory farm for 10 people. One person suddenly develops a conscience and decides to change their lifestyle by not eating their cow products, switching to a purely iceberg lettuce based diet, reducing demand by 10% outright and causing 10 fewer cows to be bred for the evil factory farm.

But actually this is WORSE than someone developing only a bit of a conscience and deciding that instead of giving the evil factory farm money for 10 dead cows a year, they’ll give their farmer best friend who they know personally and trust and who gives the cows pedicures and lets them drift away quietly in their sleep money for 10 dead cows a year? And this is better and more moral because in this world it is a universal constant that a set amount of cows must be killed each year, and by abstaining from meat entirely you are giving the evil factory farm a greater proportion of the cosmically allocated dead cow quota?

Because if so, this is great news for my ethical cat steak business.

I’m sorry, I’ll try harder next time. Will you find it in your heart to forgive me, like the ethically raised cows forgive ethical farmers for putting them out on an empty pasture for a couple of years, branding them, regularly inseminating them to keep them producing milk, and then killing them at the ripe old age of about a fifth of their natural life span? A fate, we will all admit, that is much better than simply not existing in the first place. Honestly, I’d take their place myself if I could, if it meant an ethical meat eater didn’t need to pass up their daily steak.

Trolling? Just because I dared to share my culinary culture, passed down through many generations of animal lovers, on your stupid vegan website? This sort of toxicity is why no one respects you vegans. I’m going to eat twice as many ethically sourced cat burgers now, maybe you can use this as an opportunity to think about how to get people on your side instead of just being an asshole on your (vegan) high horse 🤣😂🖕

Thank you for your mindfulness and letting the animals you eat have the nicest possible life 🤗 I’m a vegan, but when I really get the cravings for protein (plants simply don’t have any) I go on the internet and find cats looking to be rehomed, then after pampering them for a few weeks, I butcher and eat them. It’s a lot more ethical than supermarket meat, the cats always seem so happy and content knowing they give their lives for my continued survival! Of course I make sure to ethically and painlessly kill them by beating their skull in with a baseball bat, in case you were concerned. They have only one very bad day in their entire life, ha ha!

Tribalism is fun

So true bestie! As a vegan carnivore (yes, we exist) it really upsets me whenever PURIST vegans think they have the moral high ground just because they don’t consume animal products. Don’t they understand that if I don’t eat meat at least once a day my brain will violently explode of B12 deficiency? I’m basically forced to eat meat by BIOLOGY, and even if I wasn’t, the cows probably don’t mind living in battery farms and getting killed anyway otherwise they’d say something.

I’m vegan btw.

A t420, but yes

It’s not my main machine but it is my only laptop, and sticking an extra 8gb of ram and an ssd in it was all it needed to become very responsive even for modern software. Unless you’re playing video games or doing some heavyweight media editing projects, those older CPUs and GPUs can cope better than one might expect

It wants to be feature rich, configurable, and flexible

GNOME already has the Apple “we know better than you so it’s our way or the highway” design strategy down to an art

Be the most versatile and usable DE with the best applications

Also works on my machine (14 year old thinkpad)