is crystal sugar granulated sugar vegan?!
My question is confusing so the link is a picture of the sugar.
Answers:
I'm still confused after looking at the picture. Why wouldn't sugar be vegan? Sugar is a plant product, although granulated sugar is unhealthy and heavily processed.
Update: I don't think so. This is what I found on their website regarding how they process the sugar beets they use to get the sugar...
American Crystal’s beet sugar processing takes place in specially designed processing facilities. At each factory, sugarbeets are washed and sliced into thin strips called cossettes. The cossettes go through a large tank called a diffuser where raw sugar juice is extracted. The cossettes are gently lifted from the bottom to the top of the diffuser as hot water washes over them absorbing the sugar. After the sugar-laden raw juice is drawn off, the beet pulp is left behind. This pulp is processed separately and formed into pellets for livestock feed and other products (See the Agri-Products section of the Web site).
The raw juice is mingled with milk of lime and carbon dioxide gas in carbonation tanks. The carbon dioxide bubbles through the mixture forming calcium carbonate. The non-sugar particles attach themselves to the calcium carbonate and settle to the bottom of the tanks.
The juice is then filtered, leaving a golden light brown clarified thin juice. This juice is boiled under vacuum where much of the water is evaporated, forming a thicker juice similar to pancake syrup. After a second filtration to ensure that all non-sugar materials are removed, the juice goes to the boiling pans. Once again the juice is boiled under vacuum and crystals begin to form. The resulting sugar crystal and syrup mix is called massecuite.
The massecuite is then sent to centrifuges for separation. By spinning rapidly in a perforated cylindrical basket, the molasses syrup is thrown off through the screen holes. The molasses syrup that remains after the sugar crystals are initially separated is further processed to remove more sugar crystals. American Crystal has two of these molasses desugarization facilities where this valuable residual sugar is claimed.
Clean hot water is used to wash the sugar, producing pure white sugar crystals. The damp crystals are dried with filtered air in a rotating drum granulator and the dried sugar passes over screens which separate the various sizes of sugar crystals. The sugar goes through a curing process and is then packaged into various retail and commercial packages, or into rail cars, and shipped to stores and food manufacturers.