Sometimes a Vegan Donut Isn't a Vegan Donut

A couple of weeks ago, a few friends and I considered an impromptu meetup at a New York coffee shop known throughout the community for their vegan friendliness as both purveyors of vegan goods- employing an on-site vegan baker from the time of their inception, and regular host of vegan events. Schedules and train delays conspired against it, and so a solitary friend wound up enjoying an iced soy latte with a vegan sugar donut all by her lonesome. As vegans tend to do, she posted said snack on social media and purchased a donut for each of the vegan friends she was on her way to meet.

 

Across town, I was en route to an early dinner when I received a troubling text from a friend who had just seen the post and happens to be the former vegan baker at said coffee shop,

“Text her…I haven’t delivered to them in over a month…She’s eating a non vegan doughnut right now.”

A blizzard of text messages ensued in all directions: sent, received, and forwarded until all three vegans were able to piece together that- despite having been told that “all of the donuts” were vegan and even specifying the previous vegan bakery by name, the coffee shop was- in fact, no longer carrying vegan donuts at all. One furious baker, one queasy friend, and me- the stunned facilitator, all stopped in our respective vegan tracks for a moment to catch our breath.

The baker immediately contacted the coffee shop to alert them to the fact that they were misrepresenting non-vegan items as vegan. The response was swift and relatively aloof, citing a likely mistake by a new staff member. But if the baker hadn’t delivered vegan goods to the coffee shop in over a month, why would a new staff member assume the baked goods were vegan and/or have any idea who the former baker was? Once she further relayed that the recipient of the misinformation and non-vegan donut was a well-known, social media-savvy member of the vegan community, the response was significantly more concerned and an email of apology went out immediately- to be received moments after the victim of the event finished expelling the offending donut.

It’s not as though we don’t already know that vegan ingredients aren’t always taken seriously in the food industry. If Starbucks accidentally squirts whip on your latte they think it’s okay to just scoop it out. Many omnivorous restaurants wouldn’t hesitate to remove the chicken from your salad in the kitchen and give you back the same contaminated leaves. But, it's not a question of purity. Particularly if you’re an establishment that has built much of its customer base on vegans, aren’t you more than a little responsible for the information you impart?

Food for thought. I'd love to hear yours.

[UPDATE: through the power of hashtags on the interwebs, I was able to find that the incident at this establishment was not an isolated one and has reoccurred since.]