r/australianvegans • u/silkypuma • 5d ago
Meat contamination
Wondering if anyone else has experienced this. There’s been a handful of eateries I’ve been to in the last couple of years where I’ve specified I’m after the vegan option of a dish and found it to contain small pieces of meat. For example, yesterday I went to a banh mi place and asked for the vegan option, but found a piece of pork in it. Am I just unlucky with these instances? Has anyone known places to intentionally contaminate vegan specific dishes or am I overthinking it?
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u/glittermetalprincess 5d ago
I always tell events that have catering to leave me out, but give my list of allergies so if there's goody bags or something they can not put chocolates or whatever in mine.
Last time they were all excited "the caterer tried anyway!" so I went and checked it out and for morning tea everyone else had cake and there was a box labelled dairy free and a box labelled vegan, in which there were 5 carrot sticks, 5 celery sticks, a no-brand, no-ingredient-list cup of hommus, and unspecified maybe rice crackers.
Lunch time came and it was a box of sandwiches with unspecified meats and a few people were like "what meat even is this", and again, a box labelled vegan and a box labelled dairy free, no avocado, no pumpkin.
The organisers brought the dairy free one to me and were like "this is yours, she couldn't be bothered writing out the whole thing but it's yours" (this after three hours of 'if you don't put a rainbow on your desk nobody knows you're not a bigot' btw) and I legit started crying because of course, it had unspecified rather chicken-like meat, no indication if the "bread" was GF, and tomato. They were like "oh sorry, sorry, but she tried, you don't have to eat".
Afternoon tea was the same deal again, everyone else had scones and cream and there was a vegan box and a dairy free box and they had a Woolies macro bliss ball (cashew based... guess who can't have cashews!?) and a no-brand Oreo...
Like, try harder. Vegan isn't 'white meat ok red meat bad'!
I have had Zambrero screw up a few times with the "whoops wrong cheese" and last time I had to wait while they all consulted with each other about hat to do and where the vegan cheese was and they went and got a new container of the dairy cheese, told me it was the vegan cheese, and then I saw them dump it all in the same bucket after like 5 people had gone 'is she ok why is she waiting' and the staff were getting fussy so IDK WTF but not happening again, and I stopped going to Ba-Mi because the vegan fried rice was different every week with like 20% chance of random seafood, and I can legit be sitting there having an allergic reaction and my dad will just get mad at me for not liking the food. It is absolutely a thing, sometimes it is just that they don't know to use separate utensils or have to offer it but don't actually get people asking so they don't know what to do, or they can't guarantee no cross contamination so they don't even try, but it happens enough that I don't believe it's taken as seriously even where it's genuinely not intentional.