Laboratory tests of vegan restaurants in LA find some aren't

The subject matter is interesting, but what I find most interesting is a blog performing real, 'hard-hitting' local journalism, of genuine interest to a very specific social subgroup.

As a non-vegan, these recipes truly baffle me. Why on earth would anyone eat that? Surely there are some nice, simple dishes you can make using fruits and nuts and vegetables, rather than these massively processed soy products pretending to be meat or fish or cheese? Seriously, what's the point?

This is going to have some pretty big reprecussions for the restaurants in question. A few years back the same thing happened on the east coast when someone ate a vegan philly "cheese" steak at a vegan joint and swore down that it could NOT be vegan. They ordered one to go and utilized their campus laboratory to discover that, yes, it had casein in it. Turned out that the supplier of the restaurants vegan cheese had not been entirely honest. It looks like the same thing is happening with a lot of these cases. Most people source their vegan "meats" from central import supermarkets and the people doing the translation seem to be leaving out a few crucial facts i.e. "this vegetarian fish contains fish" etc.<p>This is another great reason to source your food locally. When you are having to trace the contents of what is going into your mouth across state borders let alone oceans you're going to have some difficulty.<p>One of my long term plans is to open a restaurant which sources <i>everything</i> locally (with in the county) - it will be inherently vegan but will not champion that so as to not turn people off of the concept but rather push the idea of healthy food supporting local business and thus the overall food security for the community.

Casein is a huge problem. I went to the nearest grocer (a Safeway) and looked at the ingredients in all of the "vegan" cheeses and psudo-meats. All contained casein or some ambiguously named "milk protein".<p>Also, soy protein (isolate and concentrate) is harmful and is contained in a wide variety of additional vegan foods:<p><a href="http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2005nl/april/050400pusoy.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2005nl/april/050400pusoy.htm</a><p>Bottom line: For best results eat foods in their natural state or as close as possible, with minimal processing.

I have been on a "gluten-free" diet for a couple years now. This means that I have to carefully inspect the ingredients list of everything I eat, something that I didn't really do before. The results are unappetizing to say the least. Even worse, sometimes potentially harmful ingredients are not necessarily listed, or are listed by some rarely-known name.<p>If you wish to have good control over what you're eating, whether that means avoiding gluten, casein, animal products, soy, etc; your best bet is to prepare all of your own food. Don't eat out, don't buy preprepared foods at the market.<p>Disclaimer: I'm not quite disciplined enough to follow that advice, and I know that I end up eating small amounts of gluten. It's a trade off between stress and nutrition, I guess. Since vegans usually don't get sick by eating trace amounts of non-vegan food, my advice is to just deal with it. And be happy that you don't have a lot of real food allergies (unless you do, of course).

Vegan and vegetarian always fascinated me why do they, or you if you are among them, seek out normal foods that should not fit their diet, such as lets say vegetarian hamburgers bacon etc.<p>Or even from the article why are they searching out quesadillas, cheese pizza, pancakes things that me seem to clearly not be vegan other than that they may have found a way to make remnants of them.<p>It just seems counter-cause to me.

This reminds me of the schoolgirls in New Zealand who tested Ribena and found it contained almost no Vitamin C: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/27/schoolsworldwide.foodanddrink" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/27/schoolsworldwide...</a>

I'm not vegan, but now I have to wonder what contaminants are in my food.

Why would a vegan blog do this in the first place? Presumably the vast majority of vegans are so for ethical reasons; they can't possibly be allergic to anything that has once been part of an animal. In which case, veganism (?) is basically the definition of "what you don't know can't hurt you."<p>I applaud the blog for their investigative journalism, but all they've really done is taken restaurant choices away from a group that already has a smaller number of places to eat.<p>Right? Am I missing something?

I wonder how many vegans and vegetarians are also pro-choice and how they reconcile that inconsistency.

Concerns about the results aside I found it wonderful that the people who carried out the experiment, while not producing a bulletproof scientific analysis, were very thorough and kept to the stated aim to have a fair scientific trial. Blinded randomization, repeated measurements, and further information about those tests would have been interesting to see, but the article manages to largely avoid jumping to unwarranted conclusions. They asked a fair question; performed systematic, documented experiments; and then produced compelling research to support their theory.<p>Altogether it's a testament to using science to explore everyday questions.

Reminds me of this story: <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSN2632416820070326" rel="nofollow">http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSN26324168...</a> (Where two teenage girls found out that Ribena (Blackcurrent) Juice didn't contain any Vitamin C - despite advertisements to the contrary. GSK eventually admitted 15 breaches of the NZ Fair Trading Act.

<a href="http://failblog.org/2009/06/29/bulletin-board-win/" rel="nofollow">http://failblog.org/2009/06/29/bulletin-board-win/</a>