and who said no good would come of all this? in the wake of vegan photogate, a new website called veganstockphoto.com has risen from the ashes. the official launch is tomorrow, and it’s gonna host pretty much exactly what you’d expect: vegan stock photos.

here's a picture of genuinely vegan waffles by "meet the wikos"

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the moment we’ve been waiting for has arrived. after an unapologetic response to last week’s uproar, vegnews has finally changed their ways and offered an official apology…

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UPDATE 4/18/11: VegNews has finally apologized and changed their policy!

UPDATE 4/15/11: Someone left an unsubstantiated comment claiming the burger image we used earlier was vegetarian. I’ve replaced the photo with another real beef burger, as seen on VegNews.com.

Do you like looking at pictures of meat? How about a juicy beef burger, covered in egg mayonnaise with cow fat dripping off? Perhaps some soft, meaty chunks of chicken breast in chicken stock and cream? What about a pork sausage, oozing in pig fat, fresh from the slaughterhouse? OK, let’s tone it down a little. Perhaps you like to look at egg mayonnaise potato salad, made with eggs from those poor battery hens that are dead basically from the moment they are born. How about creamy mac and cheese made with real cow’s milk, pulled painfully from their sore and tender udders, infused with antibiotics, pain and anguish?

If so, you can find all this in the nation’s premier print and online vegan magazine, VegNews. Surprised? Shocked? Read on…

real meat ribs have bones removed with photoshop to appear vegan

We’ve always been fans of VegNews, since back in the mid-2000s when we’d wait with bated breath for the US Mail to deliver our copy. We’d eagerly flip through, reading all about the latest veg stuff, salivating over the amazing pictures, trying out a vegan recipe, and maybe even discovering a restaurant in our home town through one of their reviews.

it’s sad, then, that the pictures we’ve been drooling over for years are actually of MEAT! Veg News has written tens (possibly hundreds) of articles extolling the virtues of a vegan lifestyle, while purchasing rock-bottom priced stock photos of MEAT, EGGS, DAIRY and other completely non-vegan things. You doubt this? See below:

stock photo of real meat ribs. a doctored photo of this appears on veg news.

We started searching for more examples of Veg News using meat photos next to “drool-worthy vegan recipes,” and the results were disturbing…

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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!