A U.K. chief received death threats after she claimed to have “spiked” a vegan diner.
In a few hours, she got online threats. Angry vegans, who don’t eat animal products, started attacking her in droves, The Telegraph reported.
They also hacked her restaurant’s website and posted offensive pictures and comments.
One wrote: “This lady should be charged with assault. We are vegan for a reason. To disregard our wishes and boast about contaminating our food is at least a sackable offense.”
Another wrote: “Feeding a non vegan meal to someone who has made the compassionate or potentially even medical choice not to eat animal products intentionally is disgraceful and then to brag about it on your Facebook page. I hope you are ashamed of yourself.”
Hope Lye, who is the founder of Telford Vegan Action, and who organized the protest, told the paper: “I have had dairy product put in a meal before and because I have been a vegan so long I ended up in hospital with violent diarrhea and violent stomach cramps.”
“When you are trying to live an ethical lifestyle this is a place where you expect the chef to get it right, so this is absolutely appalling,” she said.
Goodman’s fiancé and business partner, Mike Gale, later apologized for the remarks, according to the paper. He said that they were forced to call the police after getting death threats, while adding that Goodman may have had “too much to drink” before posting the comments.
“One of them ordered a margarita pizza, which is not vegan-friendly,” Gale explained in his version of what happened. “One of the waitresses at the end of the meal came down and said, ‘You know, I think one of that group had a margarita pizza,” he said.
“Laura said that if you were a vegan you‘d know that mozzarella is not vegan. So, slightly disappointed that they hadn’t chosen to have what she’d prepared for them, and amused at the thought that they had had that pizza, she made this flippant remark on Facebook,” he said.
Goodman, meanwhile, also wrote that she spent hours preparing vegan food for the group.
Gale added: “Since then our world has been turned upside down with death threats, threats of violence, threats of lawsuits from all around the world. It’s been global.”
“We’ve completely shot ourselves in the foot. We now understand that in the vegetarian and vegan world, saying that you’ve ’spiked‘ someone’s food means that you put meat in it, which isn’t the case here,” he said. “’I think that the whole storm that has arisen has come from that word ‘spike.’”
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