Via boingboing I came on this article. It’s a group of vegan friends in LA that decided to get food from their favorite vegan eateries and, as scientifically as possible, test for non-vegan ingredients. They used the same kits that manufacturers use to be sure there is no dairy, egg or casein (a protein from cheese) in products – or no measurable amounts.

I’m not vegan and frankly I find it a ridiculous choice, but the level of enthusiasm and rigor that these and many other vegans bring to their eating experience is undeniable. I’ll spoil the ending by saying that they indeed found that some of the items contained non-vegan ingredients. They were sure to give warnings that although they were careful the test can’t account for whey (another no-no), nor can it account for conditions in the kitchen. The tests are sensitive enough that if someone made a grilled cheese and then assembled a vegan entree in the same area it would register as a positive for casein.

We aren’t really aware where our food comes from. My grandfather owned a cattle ranch and for years I thought everyone raised Angus beef like he did – finding out about commercial feedlots was paradigm-shifting.¹ Finding out about the other types of feedlots, where cows never eat grass, except at the end of their lives to lessen the amount of e coli. in their systems was another shift.²

These LA vegans when they discovered that their entrees weren’t entirely vegan went up the chain. The called the distributor of the vegan meat-substitutes (the largest offender) and were given information there (it helps to be non-combative) and were directed to the Taiwanese manufacturer. They even called the Taiwanese Board of Health to ask some questions!

In the end, most of the vegan restaurants were cleared. A few, with vegan in their name, served real cheese instead of vegan cheese – from a cook’s standpoint I can understand. Vegan cheese is wholly unappetizing in texture and appearance. The taste is alright, but it doesn’t melt or stretch (casein forms the stretching bond in milk cheeses). But you don’t advertise something that you fail to deliver – in this case a vegan meal.

I wanted to point out this article as well because these folks recognized an important fact. It’s their choice to eat vegan and they are in the minority. They weren’t testing dishes from just any restaurants, they targeted places that catered to them. And before they complained to the restaurants they went to the source of the ingredients – in the case of the vegan meat-substitutes the restaurants were mostly innocent – meat-substitutes are expensive and time consuming to make in house and they purchased from a reputable source. They weren’t trying to force non-vegan eaters to eat vegan – food proselytizing is rife with failures. They wanted to know the quality of their food and where it came from.

The problem came from lax food-labeling laws in Taiwan (a problem already addressed in the Taiwanese government and working it’s way through the system). No one, except the quesadilla place that used real cheese, is a bad guy in this story. The Taiwanese likely thought there was little difference between vegan and vegetarian and they already had the ingredients so it would be a shame to waste them. Taiwanese law didn’t require labels to mention trace amounts of egg, dairy and nuts because they don’t have as many allergies nor litigators.³ It’s more a cultural misunderstanding compounded by a lackadaisical interest in our food sourcing.

The last point of interest is how difficult it was for them to get the initial information. The testing kits aren’t available to the general public – the conspiracist in me says this is because they don’t want you to know what’s in your food, the rationalist counters that the average person would use the kit wrong and get cross-contamination. They had to represent themselves as a new restaurant to get information from the distributor and manufacturer – most food distributors won’t speak to the consumers except through their PR departments. There’s too much information that can be construed, rightly so in some cases, as negative: how long your food sits in warehouses and trucks, how far it travels, the varying temperatures, varying health regulations from state to state and internationally⁴, how many people touch it before the grocery store or restaurant, low wages, ad infinitum.

There’s lots of information out there in our modern world on food and food sourcing but some of its difficult to get your hands on. Regardless, knowing where your food comes from can add some real joy to the eating experience (or, alternatively as you first do it, horror), and is well-worth the effort. I’m lucky to live in a place that has tons of farmer’s markets and CSA (food shares) and interest in the topic, but interest seems to be growing nationwide. I think it can’t come too soon for everyone.

¹ He did sell his cows on to feedlots, but it was mostly for “finishing” (as I understand), where the cow is fed corn for a few weeks to increase the marbling in the meat, and also add some more weight before being sold on to the abattoir. But for most of their lives they were free-range and grass-fed.

² Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a good read on this. The chapter on corn covers most of what the average American eats over their lifetime.

³ The food allergy question is and always has been intriguing and infuriating. I feel that there are more people that use allergies as an excuse for food they don’t like than there are those who have intolerances that cause discomfort and fewer still people who die from food allergies. It’s a too-easy diagnosis on the part of doctors and parents. Studies in Britain have found that the immune system needs to be active and in its vigilance, children in too-clean environments can develop food allergies as a result of their being no other baddies for the immune system to fight.

⁴ Spices from Asia are irradiated at the border – even organic spices. Due to some law, all spices from Asia are subjected to high-dose, quick flashes of radiation to kill microbes, etc. then they sit for a specified amount of time (to allow the radiation to dissipate) before being sent on to be bottled and distributed. There’s nothing unhealthy about this, it’s less radiation than you get from walking in certain parts of the US, but it feels wrong, especially when you discover that the legislation was pushed by a senator from a state that produces organic spices and was lobbied for by American growers.