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VegNews pisses off vegans everywhere
Thanks to a mouse at wank_report for this!

VegNews is "an award-winning vegan magazine and website packed with recipes, travel, news, food, reviews, and so much more."

"So much more" apparently means stock photos of meat used to illustrate vegan recipes. Comments are posted, comments are deleted, and users are banned when they point out that using photos of meat (some of them poorly photoshopped to remove bones) seems contrary to the tenets of the magazine.

“Thank you for your interest in VegNews. However, your inappropriate and mean-spirited commenting has violated the policy of VegNews, and we have and will continue to remove any future comments. Please know that we welcome constructive criticism from all viewpoints, and rarely unpublish comments from readers. Should you have any constructive feedback, feel free to email me directly. I’d love to hear from you.”

People are extremely not happy. (But their wanking is done in the most non-violent, humane way possible.)

VegNews posts a non-apology. Surprise, surprise, it doesn't go over well.

(Gothamist's closing line about this debacle is priceless: "Should VegNews change its name to CarnNews, was their apology enough, or is this all just much tofu about nothing?")

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visp
2011-04-15 10:33 pm UTC (link)

Aha! Vegan food is fake so their magazines have to take pictures of real food and doctor them to make them look like vegan food. It's a conspiracy, I tell you! Like fuzzy pictures of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster! Kidding, kidding! The real reason the magazine doesn't make, test and photograph its own recipes because who the hell would want to eat or look at vegan food?

All joking aside, the "real meat is so disgusting" view that the magazine espouses is hilariously undercut by them using pictures of real meat to promote their products. If I was a vegan, used to people mocking my food choice on a daily basis, I really wouldn't appreciate my lifestyle magazine adding more fodder to it - which is essentially what this does. I think that's the reason everyone's so upset.

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littleshebear
2011-04-15 11:10 pm UTC (link)

If I was a vegan, used to people mocking my food choice on a daily basis, I really wouldn't appreciate my lifestyle magazine adding more fodder to it.

This, exactly this. I'm pretty ticked off by this and I'm tired of people defending the magazine in terms of the good they've done for the movement in the past. If you're setting out to acheive something, do it honestly or there's no point. They've completely undermined whatever good they've done and shot themselves in the foot to boot. Saving money on photography is no help at all if you end up alienating your readership in the process.

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	visp 2011-04-16 01:49 am UTC (link)
	Exactly. You can't have a "Vegan food is teh yum" magazine and then go "Teehee, all those pictures we showed to help prove our point were actually of meat - oopies?" (Reply to this)(Parent)

	sandglass 2011-04-16 11:47 pm UTC (link)
	I'd be really upset at the magazine in essence lying to them. That's not what the results of the recipe look like, under any stretch of the imagination! Not even like, "Your food could look like this if you were awesome and a professional and sprayed it with hairspray and photoshopped it after you made it." (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	visp 2011-04-17 02:18 am UTC (link)
	Especially since one of the main points of Vegan magazines is "Our food has culinary legitimacy," it's got an extra sting. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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