Based on the answers here and in Elixir Slack, there are multiple ways to check if an item exists in a list.
Per answer by @Gazler:
Enum.member?(["foo", "bar"], "foo")
# true
or simply
"foo" in ["foo", "bar"]
# true
or
Enum.any?(["foo", "bar"], &(&1 == "foo")
# true
or if you want to find and return the item instead of true or false
Enum.find(["foo", "bar"], &(&1 == "foo")
# "foo"
If you want to check a tuple, you need to convert to list (credit @Gazler):
Tuple.to_list({"foo", "bar"})
# ["foo", "bar"]
But as @CaptChrisD pointed out in the comments, this is an uncommon need for a tuple because one usually cares about the exact position of the item in a tuple for pattern matching.
I started programming in Elixir yesterday, but I will try something I did a lot in JS, maybe it is useful when the list has a lot of elements and you don't want to traverse it all the time using Enum.member?