I am probably dating myself by thinking about the old Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial.
I really can’t even picture it, but the catch phrase from it clearly stuck in my mind and has become a good example of an issue I am giving thought to.
Yet while the peanut butter - chocolate mess resulted in a popular concoction, my conundrum is not likely to sound so yummy, especially to those who have long eschewed meat and/or all animal products.
The question I am thinking about is whether it is ever OK for a vegan or a vegetarian to eat something that even touched a product they would not normally eat.
For instance: if there were a tray of nachos in front of you, would it be OK to take chips from the bottom of the pile that had not been touched by the cheese piled on top? What if the cheese melted and some it leaked onto the nachos below?
I know when my daughters were younger and adopted a vegetarian lifestyle - and I wholeheartedly supported it because it was a moral choice they made - I never mixed a vegetarian dish with a utensil that I had already used to mix a meat dish. That just would not seem right.
But if you were served a sandwich and someone had accidentally put cheese on it, would it be OK to take the cheese off and eat the sandwich anyway? Should it go to waste if no one else wanted it?
One of my kids - a nearly lifelong vegetarian - now calls herself more of a freegan -not in it truest sense - but for her which means in part that if there is food available and it would otherwise go to waste - she believes it’s OK to eat it, even if it contains meat. An example she used was that after one college apartment roommate moved out, she and her remaining roommate, both longtime vegetarians - ate some leftover chicken breast that had been left in the freezer, rather than throw out.
That’s not a step I would take - I probably would have cooked the chicken and given it to my dog, who is not about to make a choice to be a vegetarian.
I am not about to indulge in a Reese's now, as the vegan trial continues. I have had vegan chocolate, thought and it was darn good.
But this question of how 'tainted' something must be by a non-vegan product before we decide not eat is an interesting one to me. What do you think?

P.S. Veggie peeps, we have something very special coming up on Vegging Out. A small clue: the full name of this blog is Vegging Out in New Haven and we asked a well known Elm city resident to guest blog for us. He did it and it's coming soon! We are very excited and hope you will be too!