Monday 16 December 2013

Quorn is NOT Vegan!


Quorn came on to the market long after I went vegan.  It's not vegan due to its prolific use of eggs and sometimes milk.  I have therefore never eaten Quorn; that is until some idiot in a restaurant decided that he would serve me some. 
 
I was on a night out with my colleagues from work and we have gone to the same Caribbean restaurant that we had the year before where the food had been very good.  As usual a request had been made in advance for all my food to be vegan.  I made the mistake of trusting a reputable restaurant to know the food products they are serving and in fact did not expect to be served with something premade anyway as part of a restaurant cooked meal. 
 
The main course arrived with a lump of something on top that I actually presumed to be plantain, which I love.  However after slicing off a small section and tasting it I was confused.  I had never tasted anything like that before so I asked the waitress who very casually told me it was Quorn.  The damage had been done by then as I really didn't have trust in any of the food that would be served me that night.  I resorted to alcoholic refreshment (which was the second mistake of the evening as I discovered the following morning!).
 
It amazes me that a business that is dealing with food was so unaware of a food item and its contents, especially when a special request of a vegan meal had been made.  Ironically the owner also seems to come from a culture not too far away from Rastafari roots.  The Rasta way of living (livity) is generally referred to as Ital, a pure approach to life and energy and Ital normally follows a vegan diet....but perhaps that's me making unfair assumptions on the culture front (not the food business front though) as it seems that most people seem to think that Quorn is vegan! 
 
I blame the fact that Quorn has a massive dominance over the vegetarian market, not really even giving an inch to other potentially vegan products on the supermarket shelves.  A sea of orange confronts you as you try and dig around for an alternative on those nights that you really cannot be bothered to 'make from scratch'.  It really annoys me and even more so now that I have been unwittingly fed the stuff!
 
So the moral of the story is...........scorn the Quorn and never trust a restaurant to exactly know what it is serving you.

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