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!