The Elusive "D"

Elusive may not be the precise word I am looking for, but I like it and so I will stick with it.

Growing up in a Reform Jewish household, I learned at a young age what the two possible kosher symbols on food were ("Circle K" and "Circle U") and what words following these symbols meant.  Meat obviously means the food contains meat.  D or diary means the food contains some sort of milk related product.  Parve means the food contains neither meat nor dairy (but for vegans, it could still contain eggs).  As a vegetarian, this became exceptionally useful.  Things labeled "chicken flavored" or the like may not actually contain meat.  Suddenly I didn't have to read all labels all the time.

This was all fine and dandy until I gave up dairy.  Suddenly anything certified kosher seemed to have the big fat D hanging off of it.  My once nifty trick has turned into a nightmare.

What's worse?  I started becoming skeptical.  It started when I noticed that the hazelnut syrup I bought for making coffee drinks had the "D" on it.  Hazelnut syrup?  What?  So I read the ingredients over and nothing popped out as dairy to me.  I had Mom look it over.  Same for her.  We had my dad look it over since he's all food-technology-expert-dude and he said that nothing was dairy in it but he saw a lot of "really nasty chemicals."  Fabulous.  Let's put some really nasty chemicals into our coffee!  His explanation?  Maybe the ingredients were grown on whey.

But how does that explain the exhorbitant varieties of popcorn that are not butter flavored nor do they list dairy ingredients but are marked as dairy?

I could go on.

So now the question stands: Do I eat these "supposedly" dairy products?  Or do I forfeit their deliciousness to the kosher gods?

I just said "kosher gods" on the week of Rosh Hashanah.  That can't be good.