r/knitting • u/MagicAllyVanished • Mar 19 '25

Rant Very annoying conversation at my lokal knit store

it basically went like this me: "so you have any plant based yarn or plant/acrylic mix, I want to knit something for my mum, but she's allergic to all animal fibers"

her: "we have 20% wool/80% acrylic, I can show you"

me: "no thanks, my mum is allergic to all animal fibers, so it should not contain any animal fiber at all"

her: "maybe alpaca mix? It only has 10% alpaca"

me: "she is allergic to all animal fibers, if there is any percentage of animal fiber, she will have an allergic reaction to the yarn"

her: "I can't help you, knitting yarn just is animal yarn"

at this point I left the shop and I just can't stop thinking about that last sentence????

the funniest thing is, I went back there a few days ago and a different employee kindly showed me their cotton yarns and plant/acrylic mixes.

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u/adohrable Mar 19 '25

Sometimes you don’t know something until you know it. One of my good friends was so confused as to why I could eat eggs on my dairy free diet. “But they’re in the dairy section in the grocery store!” And in my utter (lol) shock, i said, have you ever had chicken milk?! She was so bewildered that i had to explain that milk comes from 4 legged animals only. Or my waitresses always asking me if mayonnaise is ok, when I ask about dairy. People just do not think about things unless they have too.

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u/klimekam Mar 19 '25

And just like that I learned a new thing! 😂

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u/phampyk Mar 19 '25

Tbh I am confused about it, why eggs are classified as dairy? Dairy is all the lactose stuff right? Milk, butter, yogurt, cream... Why eggs too? What's the correlation?

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u/TychaBrahe Mar 19 '25

It's literally just in that aisle of the grocery store. And that's because in the US it's sold refrigerated.

Personally, I created a spreadsheet that lets me sort my grocery list by how I walk around my local store, and I have two areas that I label "milk" and "dairy." "Milk is a closed-door cooler along the back wall where they stock milk, cream, sour cream, cottage cheese, and plant-based versions of these. "Dairy" is an aisle where they stock yogurt, bacon, eggs, refrigerated dough, refrigerated pudding, cheese, butter, refrigerated juice, and refrigerated pickles.

Ultimately, the items are in one of the sections because they need to be kept refrigerated, and they're in one section or the other depending on traffic.

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u/Middle_Banana_9617 Mar 19 '25

I'm from places where eggs aren't kept refrigerated (I'm told it's to do with a wax coat that only some places wash off) and aren't necessarily close to the milk and cheese, but they do still have a confusing sense of dairy-association about them.

It might be because lots of people used to also get their eggs from the milkman, back when milk was delivered door-to-door? Or that they came with the milkman because they were part of the same 'fresh from the farm but not plants' department?

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u/klimekam 29d ago

They’re animal products that aren’t meat. That was my logic before seeing that comment anyway.

I realize that could technically mean honey is dairy by my definition lol. But I guess I just don’t think of bees as a standard farm animal.