An interesting report from Vegan blog QuarryGirl:
Operation Pancake: Undercover investigation of LA vegan restaurants
Is your vegan food really vegan? We pull out all the stops to test 17 LA area vegan restaurants for non-vegan ingredients, and to find out why seven of them failed miserably.
From Pure Luck to Green Leaves, Vegan House to Vegan Plate and Rosemead to Taipei we pull back the covers on the seedy world of vegan restaurants, and an international supply chain that pumps eggs and milk into our supposedly vegan food on a daily basis.
Surely, a vegan restaurant is safe to eat at if I'm a vegan?
Really? Regular readers of quarrygirl.com will recall us publishing an email and photos from "Mr. Wishbone" detailing the contents of a dumpster at LA Vegan Thai with non-vegan ingredients plainly visible, and presumably used as ingredients in the food (pancakes in this case).
After we published Mr. Wishbone's findings, several people wrote in with stories about potentially non-vegan ingredients being sighted in vegan restaurants, and one particular thread on the quarrums "Vegan Dirt" began to get rather busy, with accusations flying here and there about shrimp paste being spotted in some restaurants, and "vegan cheese" that looked and tasted exactly like dairy-based cheese being served in others.
And The Plan:
The Plan
During the meeting, Mr. Wishbone outlined an ambitious plan that would enable us to test for common non-vegan ingredients (eggs, casein [a component of milk], and shellfish) in a multitude of menu items from local vegan restaurants. The plan would be a logistical, financial and time-sucking nightmare but, if done properly, and to scientific testing standards, it would be a ground-breaking and highly reliable indicator of just how "pure" food from vegan restaurants really is.
The technique:
The testing kits that Mr. Wishbone was to obtain could positively identify three common non-vegan allergens (hen's egg, milk protein (casein), shell-fish), and were highly sensitive (down to parts per million, which explains our intense focus on process and hygiene), so we targeted food items that contained vegan "cheese", vegan "fish" (including shellfish and non-shellfish), creamy sauces, breads and stuff that had an expanded, sweet, crispy or bubbly texture (often created using eggs as binders in the cooking process).
Of 17 restaurants tested, ten came back clean, some of them came back with overload ratings (higher than high). A lot of the raw materials are imported from Taiwan so mislabeling is a big issue. Still, casein based cheese (as noted in the article) behaves completely differently from Vegan cheese that it is odd that the chefs at these restaurants would not have noticed the difference. For someone with food allergies, this is a sobering read...
