Copy Machine: You’re exactly right. You summed up, very well, the clear divide among posters on this thread. Some of us, myself included, could not possibly stop relying upon the OU. The only non-OU hechshers around me are LESS reliable than the OU. It requires great lengths just to avoid tablet K.
Somehow I seem to have be thrown on the anti-OU side of this discussion. That is absolutely not accurate, and I would like to clear my name. I said that those complaining about the non-dairy creamers have a legitimate complaint. I never said that the conclusion should be to reject the OU or even to reject those items. I just think that other posters were being a bit too dismissive. The halachah has always considered the uninformed masses. When it was decided that dairy bread is not kosher, it wasn’t being assumed that 100% of the Jewish population was the type of people who would do their research before every purchase and every meal, and sign up for any and all kashrus alerts. We have a lot of very stringent and well-informed people on these forums. Nobody here would make the mistake of using non-dairy (but actually dairy) creamer with meat. These arguments are centered around a different side of the community.
And on a side note, I PROMISE that not everyone eating oreos is checking the OU site for alerts every time they go to put one in their mouth, not even on the stricter side! If they switched to real dairy, the change would go undetected by thousands.