Vegan Magazine's Faux-Meat Recipe Photos Actually Real Meat

by Slashfood Editor, Posted Apr 14th 2011 @ 12:00PM

VegNews, the "premier magazine to focus on a vegetarian lifestyle" according to its website, has been using real meat photos to accompany its recipes, as vegan blogger QuarryGirl (blog tagline: "Meat is Murder") discovered and documented. QuarryGirl has posted several examples of stock photography of meat dishes in which VegNews has used as an image of a vegan dish.

The "Vegan Spare Ribs" recipe used a photo of actual meat ribs, with the bones photoshopped out, and a picture for Seitan Stew was actually an iStockphoto titled "Chicken Breast Soup." Other examples include hot dogs with actual meat and macaroni and cheese with actual cheese. One commenter and former VegNews intern said that everyone on the VegNews staff is fully aware of the "meat and dairy photo policy." A former copy editor echoed the intern's sentiments.

The VegNews Facebook page has a slew of disappointed commenters as well, some of which are claiming that their comments are getting deleted. Green gossip blog Ecorazzi reports that VegNews has yet to comment on its photo policy. Moral of the story: Magical Meatball Burgers are in fact not the same thing as your everyday (or, non-magical) burger.

UPDATE: VegNews posted a detailed letter on its website addressing the photo controversy and admitting to using stock photos. The letter states that "there are very few specifically vegan images offered by stock companies" and as a result of financial constraints, VegNews will sometimes use a non-vegan image.

Filed Under: Magazines, Food News
Tags: Vegan magazine, vegan magazine meat, VegNews

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

4-15-2011 @9:12AM LinC said... Why hypocrites! How difficult can it be to actually MAKE the recipe they are promoting and then take a digital picture? There are a million food bloggers out there who do that every day. VegNews deserves to fail as an enterprise if they can't be bothered to do that much.
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4-15-2011 @10:26AM gobo said... It can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars to hire photographers and food stylists, not to mention a studio, for the purpose of shooting one photo. Instead, they used a stock image, which saved them tons of time and money. This is standard industry practice. No, there are not "millions of food bloggers" that take professional photos of their recipes every day.

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4-15-2011 @12:57PM Marcia said... No, there aren't millions of bloggers that take professional photos. But I'd say I can name 10 off the bat who take pretty amazing photos. Frankly, as a VegNews reader (though not a vegan), I would prefer their photos be a tad bit less "professional" and a whole lot more "accurate".

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4-16-2011 @10:14AM RUSerious said... Really? Because they don't photoshop humans, animals, outdoor scenes, etc etc... It's standard industry practice and further more, who cares, it's a photo?!? Business' have costs restraints as well...seems like much ado about NADA
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4-15-2011 @6:25PM Ryan Patey said... It's really not that hard to obtain good quality photos for print or digital publication. I've done it for four (and soon to be five) issues of my vegan magazine, T.O.F.U., which depends almost entirely on contributors sending in articles, recipes and photos. Sure, we don't have nearly the readership and expenses that VegNews does, but we've got a lot less bad PR right now too.

www.ilovetofu.ca
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4-16-2011 @4:16AM herwin said... that's a very silly remark. These photo's are on istock and all descriptions say these are meat photo's. Why should QG contact the photographers ? Unlike you, Vegnnews themselves even admit they use real-meat photo's ! Hell, they even photoshop bones out of a steak to make it look vegan ! Let me tell you, that is NOT "industry standard" as Vegnews wants us to believe, at least not for quality mags.
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4-22-2011 @10:22AM GB said... Perhaps they thought the real pictures of meals would look as disgusting as they may taste so they used the real thing and tried to trick their readers.
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4-23-2011 @7:21AM Cheryl said... What's sad is how poorly photos are labelled/categorized on stock sites. This is the fault of the photographers, who metatag their own images. In the stock site I use, I've found *many* things that were mislabelled- pictures of lambs called kids, roast chickens that were called turkeys, rutabagas that are called turnips- the photographers often are either non-English speakers (MANY MANY from Eastern Europe- usually these are due to a lack of vocab, and I don't fault them that) who are doing the best they can or they aren't interested in accuracy, just getting their photo in as many search results as possible, since they are paid for each download of their photo. It's the author's responsibility to vet out the photos and make sure they are accurate and comply with the standards of the mag. I've actually had to tell the managing editor 2-3 times that the pic chosen was, in fact, incorrect. (used an illustration of rock candy to accompany an article on British stick of rock, which isn't the same thing, used an illustration of a turnip for a rutabaga recipe, for example...)

That being said, it's ridiculous to say that they will only use vegan photos if they continue to use stock photography- there is no way on earth to tell from the photo if, for example, the soup in a given photo uses chicken stock.

The more specific your photo needs (I run a children's language-learning mag, and believe me, trying to illustrate concepts such as prepositions in a cohesive manner so that all the photos look a bit the same is *almost* impossible), the more difficult it is to rely on stock photography. There have been times when I found the perfect image, but for some reason, I had to cut it because there was some tiny detail that didn't fit (like cyrillic lettering in the background when the illustration was supposed to be in 'English' since it's an English-language magazine). That soup they wanted? No way, unless they go to a food stock photography website (which exist). If they aren't in print (requires 300dpi), the quality and resolution doesn't need to be anywhere near the same (website illustrations typically only need 72dpi). I agree with the poster who said why not just make the dang recipe and take a pic?!

This just sounds like shoddy photo research to me.
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