Is Cheese Made with Rennet Vegetarian?

[BvBPL]

Recently I found a market that sells goat cheese at a very reasonable price.

As if that, in itself, was not remarkable, the packaging on the cheese noted that it is vegetarian. A review of the ingredients showed it included rennet.

Is cheese made with rennet actually vegetarian?

 

[Camikaze]

It depends what rennet is.

 

[Evie]

Per Wiki, there is such a thing as non-animal source rennet which is suitable for consumption by vegetarians.

 

[~Corsair#01~]

Yeah, according to the Wiki article 80% of global rennet comes from genetically engineered microbes because its cheaper. There are other issues involved than just the rennet, which is why vegans don't eat cheese, but the rennet is almost certainly fine.

 

[Lillefix]

I don't really understand the point. If you want to avoid meat and cheese and animal products and on, then good for you. But why be so religious about it, so that you worry whether or not some kind of enzyme has animal origin or not? I'm sure that one or other of the molecules in that cheese has at one time been part of an animal the last 4 billion years.

 

[BvBPL]

Lillefix, rennet has traditionally been sourced in a manner that required slaughtering the animal (or was a by-product of the slaughter. It seems hard to imagine slaughtering an animal strictly for just rennet.). This may explain why a vegetarian would be cautious about cheese.

Thank you all for the info re: non-animal rennet. I was unaware.

 

[cybrxkhan]

There does appear to be such thing as "vegetarian" rennet, but I guess that's just some non-meat substitute. Otherwise, yes, I suppose rennet wouldn't be suitable for vegetarians then. And, of course, it's not suitable for vegans either way. Anyhow, there's a lot of stuff vegetarians and vegans have to watch out for, a lot of things you'd think were vegetarian or vegan friendly but aren't. There are enough cheeses without rennet, though, so it doesn't matter much.

Source: I'm a lifelong vegetarian. Curiously though the issue with rennet was only brought to my attention recently a year or two back by my father, but I tend not to eat a lot of cheese anyways.