Vegan Switcharoo?
Wednesday, June 21, 2006 20:54Over at blogging.la there is an uproar about psuedo-vegan joints in LA. The hub-bub is over the accusation that some restaurants who call themselves vegan actually serve products which contain whey, which is not vegan.
I’m hesitant to post the names of the accused here without some more concrete evidence, but this is a good opportunity for the proprietors to reach out and clarify things, similar to when we accused Diddy Riese of using lard in their cookies and owner Mark Perry left a comment clarifying the rumor.
I do agree that veganism is an absolute and if someone claims to serve animal free food, they should definitely serve it that whey (ha!).
By Jonah (see more of his posts). Jonah is the founder of la.foodblogging and also created Digesty, a food blog aggregator and Cheww.com, a spam free foodblog search engine.
cybele says:
June 21st, 2006 at 9:02 pm
When I worked at a bakery in college (up in Eureka, a rather vegetarian area) many people asked about the ingredients in the cakes.
The owner of the bakery would lie to the customers, saying that there were dairy products in there, but no lard and that everything was made in the store. Of course there were tubs and tubs of premade frosting in the back made with lard.
I didn’t last very long there.
My guess is that it happens more often than we’d like.
VeggieGal says:
June 22nd, 2006 at 9:24 am
I’ve always wondered about the group that owns all of these “vegan” restaurants. I got really excited when 2 new vegan places opened up on Hillhurst, but they’ve got pretty much the same exact menus as ever other vegan place in town. I wish someone would open a vegetarian/vegan mexican restaurant near me. I miss Cafe Tierra Luna Sol!
Will says:
June 27th, 2006 at 10:18 am
> I do agree that veganism is an absolute
Well nothing’s “absolute” - there are a lot of grey areas. Refined sugar (often processed using bone char), processing agents like isinglass / egg white / animal enzymes, etc. It’s pretty hard to live a completely animal free existence, especially if you ever eat anything outside of your house.
I would definitely consider the possibility of small amounts of dairy / egg in processed fake meat products used by most asian vegetarian restaurants, and getting a straight answer about ingredients at these places is often going to be hard. I tend to not stress about it too too much when I’m eating somewhere that’s (otherwise) entirely vegetarian or vegan, but it’s worth keeping in mind.
(from my response to one of the posts linked in the main article) Avoiding the more processed fake meats (any fake chicken besides rehydrated soy protein or gluten, certain types of fake fish, fake shrimp, soy ham and chicken ham) will help.
I posted my comments yesterday at the bottom of the blogging.la link above… This is, of course, a problem, but I think the people who are making a stink about it (”Los Angeles Restaurants Exposed”) could be going about it a little more constructively.
Re: Luna Sol — Me too! Alegria has a couple good veggie dishes, but I miss Luna, esp. the xipotle bowl and soy tacos. I still run into some of the folks that worked there once in a while.
borealis says:
July 12th, 2006 at 4:20 pm
i’ve now read the criticism that this shouldn’t be couched as a scandal several places and i find that absurd. not everyone has the desire or the ability to not stress about if there are animal products in their food. some people find the idea repugnant, and some people eat a vegan diet because they are allergic to dairy and egg products. playing loose with people’s morals and health is a scandal.