The phase out of non-vegan inputs is more crucial than the widespread adoption of new vegan creations that would be expected to ‘advance’ veganism.

Additives, of the animal-derived variety, are typically what transform naturally-vegan commodities into non-vegan products. Many of these added ingredients have become culturally adopted, and therefore relevant in many communities.

In the case of foods, humans may have evolved to more easily digest these animal-derived ingredients. Animal-derived milk for instance, such as lactose milk from non-human sources and other animal-derived milks, is often an unnecessary ingredient that taints would-be vegan products.

These end products are often preserved, and so the milk-based ingredient is not fresh milk, is wholly avoidable, and is entirely able to be substituted. Commodities such as many variations of nuts, including almond nuts and cashew nuts, have become very popular for vegan ‘milks’ and ‘cheeses’ respectively.

Commodities such as cashews and almonds have been engineered, via selective breeding by humans, in order to become what they are today. This is largely in the same way that cows have been selectively bred for milk production or for lineage purity.

Had ancestral humans not evolved towards a preference for ‘spoils’ from the practice of hunting, only after developing a practice of scavenging the remnants of carcasses, humans may have continued their initial practice of ‘gathering’ nuts and fruits for sustenance.

It is expected that humans were better equipped to scavenge from carcasses, with the development of tools such as stone hammers. And with the development of tools such as spears, humans became better capable hunters and therefore were able to provide a more reliable food supply by hunting living prey.

Today, exploiting the tools that can be used to extract ‘milks’ from almonds, for drinking, and ‘milks’ from cashews, for transformation into ‘cheeses,’ is a widely appropriate practice ‘at scale’ for current human populations. The process of raising and nurturing dairy animals seems antiquated.

Leather goods, and similarly durable consumer goods, were crafted by artisans ages ago; out of a necessity for lasting products during historical periods when resources were scarce.

Today, leather can be deemed a purely luxury good. ‘Pleather,’ or inexpensive synthetic manufactured material, can be easier to produce naturally. Although pleather cheaply attempts to imitate leather, it provides direct evidence of the naturally emerging obsolescence of leather as an animal-derived production practice.

There are ‘alternatives to leather,’ beyond pleather, that attempt to closely imitate the comfort, durability, and appeal of cured animal leather material without sourcing primary components from the tail end of an animal’s life cycle.

Business profitability benefits can arise in the form of decreased ingredient counts and reduced regulations, when practicing the phase-out of superfluous ingredients such as lactose milk, that can be allergy-inducing.

Inclusion of these often ‘unnecessary ingredients’ is tantamount to a frivolous practice that attempts to appeal to invalid perceptions of ‘premium ingredients.’ These perceptions are imposed upon consumers through the practice of business marketing strategies rather than a naturally emerging substantive conclusion of the populace.

Innovations such as premium ‘alternatives to leather’ should, as costs reduce and as scale increases, render ‘animal-dependent leather’ obsolete.

The Vegan Digest (TVD) postulates that the phase out of unnecessary animal-derived inputs, and their related costs, from production processes would accelerate the transition away from humanity’s dependence on animal stock. This sort of phase out also serves to advance veganism as much as the newness of cruelty-free innovations.