VegNews Apologizes For Using Photos of Meat

Is this a real cheeseburger? Does it even matter?

Food photography, like most advertising, is designed to make the featured product as alluring as possible. Yet while many photographers will go to great lengths to make their steaks, sandwiches and salads look appetizing, if you knew what was actually in the pictured food you’d probably be left with a really bad taste in your mouth.

Take this latest story for example: vegetarian lifestyle magazine VegNews was thrown on the grill recently for misleading its readers about the items featured in its photographs. The magazine has reportedly used photos of meat products to illustrate vegan items, a practice the mag says was unavoidable due to its tight budget.

“In an ideal world we would use custom-shot photography for every spread, but it is simply not financially feasible for VegNews at this time,” the magazine said in a statement on its website.

Among the pictures of meat posing as non-meat (discovered by the vegan blog QuarryGirl.com) was an image titled “veganized Brunswick stew,” which was actually just chicken soup. In another photograph for a dish called vegan spare ribs, editors reportedly took the time to photoshop bones out of real meat.

Normally this sort of food trickery is nothing out of the ordinary. Anyone who’s ever had a Big Mac knows the immaculate hamburger you see in commercials looks nothing like the limp soggy thing you actually end up with. And most restaurants don’t even use edible material in their ads — the glossy magazine meal is usually crafted from vegetable shortening and fancy dyes, and is held together by glue.

But when a vegetarian magazine decides to to use different photographs mislead people about what their food is going to look like, what are readers supposed to think?

We’ll leave it to the foodies to debate the ethics of using these photographs of meat to illustrate recipes that are supposed to be without meat. But VegNews’s complaint is that photographing its own food is just too expensive, and this forces it to turn to stock photography, which does not have a lot of vegan (read: alternative) photographs available.

In that case, should they have just tried to come up with their own photos? Would images of a lesser quality have been acceptable to readers if they knew that the magazine didn’t compromise their beliefs to obtain them? What do you think?