The other day, I wrote a post about the Vegan YouTubers I watch the most. One of them is the Vegan Zombie. He’s been vegan for over two decades, and he does product reviews, recipes, and other vegan-focused vlogs.
The other day, he was at an expo called Natural Products Expo West. There he ate something like a meatball by Impossible Burger, and, surprisingly, it had cheese in it. After he ate it, he was trying to figure out whether it was vegan cheese or not.
You can see in the following video that things don’t seem to add up when he’s asking questions about the cheese. The video will start from the Impossible Burger portion and it goes until about the 7:45 mark.
As you can see, the woman comes up and says that the meatballs today have vegan cheese, but yesterday they had parmesan.
But that doesn’t sit right, does it? Why would they use dairy cheese one day and then vegan cheese the next? That’s ridiculous. And things that sound ridiculous are usually not true.
After the expo, Chris gets on a phone call with Impossible Foods and it just blows my mind what the woman says. Listen for yourself in the following video.
I think he spoke very well and asked all the right questions, trying not to let her get away with her rambling. But, even though she admitted there was dairy, she didn’t want to be honest and answer the questions he was asking, which makes me lose trust in the company.
If she had admitted that the employees were wrong, things would be different. But, instead, she stood by the employees who either lied or were completely incompetent and didn’t know what they were doing.
I’m assuming she was doing what she was told to do, but that just means that someone higher up is telling her to not admit that the employees were lying, which is even worse to me. They are standing by employees who seemed to deliberately lie to someone about what was in their food knowing that vegans and people with dairy allergies do not want to eat or can’t any amount of dairy cheese.
She kept talking about miscommunication. That wasn’t miscommunication.
Miscommunication is when someone says, “There’s cheese in there,” and you hear, “There’s vegan cheese in there.” Lying is when they say, “There’s vegan cheese is there today,” knowing that there isn’t. To me, that’s what happened.
It seems like it’s impossible to get a straight and honest answer from Impossible Foods.
This one incident is enough to turn me off from them forever. There are plenty of other options out there, and I’m not their target audience anyway. As they said, they target, first and foremost, meat eaters, so they can be the ones to get their half vegan fix from a company that, according to their FAQ, claims to develop plant-based substitutes for meat and dairy products.
The bottom line is that anything Impossible Foods says or does in the future would be questionable to me as a vegan, so I’m just going to avoid their foods altogether.
