Are McDonald's Apple Pies Really Vegan?

There's never been a better time to be vegan. Plant-based options are readily available on fine dining menus and drive-thrus alike, from Starbucks to Taco Bell (where you can make almost any menu item vegan), and many more chains have vegan options on their menus. But when it comes to the biggest of the fast food giants, McDonald's has been curiously slow to get with the times. There's no nationally available meatless burger under the Golden Arches, and even its french fries — the universal fallback food for hungry vegans — are made with a long list of ingredients that includes beef flavoring.

One of McDonald's very scant plant-based options is its Apple Pie, but is this item even 100% safe for vegans? According to the FAQ on the McDonald's website, the sweet, handheld pockets of flaky crust surrounding "American-grown apples" (according to the item's menu description) are "made with ingredients that are suitable for vegetarians (i.e. contain no ingredients of animal origin) and they are cooked in dedicated frying vats using a non hydrogenated blend of rapeseed and sunflower oil."

Still confused? If you dig further into the actual ingredient list, it does indeed appear that the pies are safe to eat for both vegans and vegetarians alike, as they contain no ingredients with established animal-based origins. The most fastidious vegans, however, might still harbor some concerns.

The "are they or aren't they vegan" murkiness surrounding Micky D's Apple Pies is due largely to the chain's own wording on the FAQ page. Somewhat confusingly, McDonald's states that the pies are made with no animal-derived ingredients (the definition of vegan food), yet it only explicitly deems them "safe for vegetarians." For vegans, this non-answer is an all-too-common non sequitur — just because a dish is vegetarian doesn't mean it's fully vegan. Luckily, this vague response is (mostly) quieted by a little bit of digging into the ingredient list, which lists no milk, eggs, or other animal-derived products.

A caveat worth knowing, however, is that while McDonald's cooks its pies in the dedicated frying vats, the company admits there's still a slight chance for potential cross-contamination with oils used to cook its meat products. Additionally, some online chatter debates the exact origins of the pies' L-cysteine, an amino acid used as a dough conditioner. According to reported findings from The Vegetarian Resource Group, McDonald's Apple Pies do contain L-cysteine made from unspecified animal products. While this is a common additive in many foods, the ingredient is sometimes made from such sources as duck feathers or even human hair.

If you're a stickler for avoiding any encounter with animal products, you might want to pass on this dessert, just in case. If these grey-area concerns aren't deal-breakers for you, though, feel free to add this flaky, sugary treat to your ever-growing list of easy-to-find vegan fast food options.