When President Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize last week, his first public reaction was a one-word tweet, “Humbled“. While a VegNews award isn’t quite as prestigious we’re also humbled that Operation Pancake, our investigation into Los Angeles area vegan restaurants, would win a “Scandal Breakers of the Year” award from VegNews magazine. The list was broken this morning over on ecorazzi, as follows:

As a quick reminder, for Operation Pancake we tested samples of food from seventeen Los Angeles area restaurants (all but one supposedly entirely vegan) and found that 40% of tested positive for ingredients that were not of vegan origin. We then tracked back the ingredients of many of these dishes to fake meat plants in Taiwan, and uncovered major inconsistencies with food preparation and labeling. It’s possible that many fake meats in supposedly vegan foods are not just non-vegan, but actually contain real meat.

What’s sobering about Operation Pancake, though, is not what we found, but what we didn’t find. It’s likely that all over the world vegans are eating animal products without realizing it, and we hope that the publicity gained by our investigation will help them to “vote with their feet” and only buy vegan foods from reputable sources.

Many thanks to VegNews for recognizing our work, we hope the publicity might persuade a couple more people to buy strictly vegan produce to save a few animals from a degrading life, and agonizing death.

If you read the original posts, they’re well worth reading again, especially the comments – some of which are really insightful. In the meantime, we’ll wait for our Veg News to arrive with the full scoop on November 1st!

Team quarrygirl and our collaborator, Mr Wishbone, gladly accept the award!

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ronald’s donuts in las vegas are known to be the best vegan donuts ever. quite possibly the best vegan desserts ever. however, they are so cheap, so good, and so “real” tasting…they often leave people wondering if they are really vegan. i mean, why is this little hole in the wall shop in nevada the only place to master the art of the vegan bear claw?

some internet digging produced stories of rey ortega from sun flour baking having the donuts tested for veganocity, but the actual lab results were nowhere to be found. well thanks to mr. wishbone, the stealth agent behind operation pancake (our undercover investigation of the ingredients at LA vegan restaurants), we were able to get our hands on rey ortega’s report.

the results for the glazed donuts tested show that if any egg white was present, it was below the threshold they could detect. although rey didn’t have the samples tested for milk products, at least we can rest assured that the donuts don’t contain egg…which is a prominent ingredient in every donut recipe i can find online.

i definitely feel comfortable enough to continue eating ronald’s donuts after these results, but stay tuned…maybe we can get these suckers tested for milk in the future. until then, let’s give rey ortega of sun flour baking a big shout out for getting the donuts tested. doing this stuff isn’t easy or cheap, and now we can all eat our sweets with peace of mind.

and thanks to mr. wishbone for the tip. DONUTS.

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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.

NOTE: Please see update regarding Green Leaves Vegan here

UPDATE: Please check out the follow-up post from today when you’ve read this. THANKS.

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.

Vegan Quesadilla from Green Leaves Vegan tested “Overload” for casein, a milk protein.

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.

While this blog hasn’t hesitated to call out non-vegan “vegan donuts” and non-vegan “vegan cheese pizzas” in the past, we can only make information public that can be empirically proven. Accusations and reports of non-vegan ingredients and suspect food handling (of which we get many) have to stay smoldering in our Deleted Items folder laying in a morass of uncertainty. Or so we thought until a couple of weeks ago, when Mr. Wishbone emailed again, and requested a meeting: “I have some knowledge of the food industry, and I think we can prove whether or not a food item contains certain non-vegan ingredients. I can tell you, though, it’s not going to be easy or cheap. If we meet I’ll share my ideas”. Intrigued, and under the strictest secrecy, we met up for lunch.

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. Here’s an outline of the plan:

• Locate a facility that has no traces of egg, casein or shellfish in which to perform the advanced tests
• Purchase anti-contamination equipment including industrial sterilization supplies, lab coats, uncontaminated bags, swabs, razor blades, gloves and floor coverings
• Obtain highly restricted industrial food testing “kits” only available to the food manufacturing industry
• Develop a regimented process to test each food item with the highest standards of inter-test cleanliness, ensuring that absolutely no food particles from one food item contaminate another
• Select a diverse set of menu items from 100% vegan-only restaurants throughout LA (with one exception, see later)
• Order the food for carry-out, and seal it in an airtight bag in its original packaging either inside, or very close to the point of purchase
• Transport the food items to the testing facility intact and sealed, and perform the tests within 48 hours of purchase, keeping them refrigerated until immediately before the test
• Develop a strict bracketing control, with a thorough analysis of the testing facility and equipment before testing: A negative control to ensure no pre-existing contamination, and a positive control test on a known-positive food product (containing all three target non-vegan items) to ensure that the tests do indicate positive results
• Conduct the test in absolute secrecy to ensure that no restaurant would know they were providing samples, and pose as regular customers ordering take-out food in a normal way, with no disclosure that the items would be used for a test

So, we divided up the work between us, and dedicated a Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday as well as over $1,000 of our collective money to pulling off the most extensive scientific test that we know of to find out, once and for all, if samples of restaurant food are vegan or not.

The Story

Here’s the story of what we did, how we did it and the surprising results….

Read the rest of this entry »

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