http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/3115410.stm

Comments?

Mixed views. Vegetarian restaurants usually take great pride in being just that--completely vegetarian--so I suppose it was understandable. A bit extreme, but not surprising. I'm more surprised that this made the news...surely there are bigger fish to fry, even in Wales.
I have vegetarian in-laws (we are not vegetarian) and if we bring any meat products into the house (we try to avoid it, but sometimes...), we have to use some older plates and cutlery that aren't normally used. I know that may sound extreme to some people, but I respect the right of vegetarians to stick to their guns. Ditto with kosher food prep/dining rules.

I agree with the mother, it is ridiculous. Contamination? like the chicken will leap out of the jar and into all the other dishes?
As a non meat eating person who raised two vegetarian children, I have never come across such silliness.
The worst things I used to hear was how did we get our protein and would the children grow.
They are both quite tall and healthy, so I guess we did something right

I have to back the restaurant 100 percent, and I'm not even a vegetarian.

What really bothers me is the terrible nutrition advice that the mom is getting. As a longstanding vegetarian herself, she should have seen right through the doctor's adivce to feed two meat meals a day, and furthermore she should realize that he didn't mean that jarred babyfood that (according to the article) is less than 10 percent meat anyway.

The pediatrician clearly is among the majority who don't understand the fundamentals of nutrition, including complementary proteins that would have been available in abundance on the vegetarian restaurant's menu. Sheesh.

Interesting responses...

Anyone else?

I'm a non-vegetarian but I actually agree with the restaurant here. Their raison d'etre is to create a meat-free eating environment, so I understand why they would not want a meat product to be heated up in their kitchen. It would be quite easy for some accidental contamination to happen and in principle it is offensive to the people who's establishment you have entered. Would you ask a Jewish restaurant to warm up your bacon sandwich for you?

I can't speak to vegetarian principles, but a friend of mine who bit into a cheese sandwich prepared in (coincidentally) a vegetarian restaurant sustained a serious allergic reaction. It seems the restaurant had simply used the same knife (which they had casually wiped off beforehand) to prepare her sandwich, as for another patron's peanut butter sandwich. She is, as you can guess, seriously allergic to nuts.

So the issue of cross-contamination is a valid one. However, the restaurant I note is getting a lot of free publicity out of all this!

This 'cross contamination' issue is odd to me. How often does this happen?
I am very very allergic to shrimp. Yet they serve it in most restaurants that I eat in. I have never been cross contaminated!
I would understand if the mother had asked the cook to actually stir it up or prepare the baby food in some way, but to warm up a jar of baby food is really so harmless. In the world of vegetarians, there are more than a few fanatics, and that is what I am getting from this...a slightly out of wack reaction.
And I really don't think that warming a jar of baby food is like asking a deli to warm up your bacon sandwich.

I am not a vegetarian, but I have to side with the restaurant and its patrons. There are many vegetarians who feel that eating meat is immoral. These people may feel violated if meat is brought into an environment that they think is meat free. How would you feel if you went into a smoke-free restaurant and someone was smoking a cigar?? You would be upset. I agree with Scarlett that contamination is ridiculous, but that is not the point. When a restaurant advertises that it is meat free, it should be so.

What a bunch of stupid twits. A freakin' jar of baby food.

I'm also not a vegetarian, but I do have to side with the restaurant. Someone mentioned smoking in a non-smoking restaurant, and the similarities of serving meat in a vegetarian restaurant are the same, as would be someone bringing in a ham or BLT sandwich into a kosher restaurant.

Many years ago, my kosher cousin stayed with me his senior year in college while visiting colleges in New England. He ate all of his meals outside of my non-kosher home. My parents took him to kosher restaurants. One evening, while watching TV, I offered him an unopened can of "kosher for Passover" macaroons. He said no, and told me that they were no longer kosher (even unopened) because I didn't keep a kosher home. At the time, I thought his comment was ridiculous, but it made sense to me after I spoke to my rabbi about the incident.

I figure if it were my restaurant that I built, and that's not an easy business with easy hours, it'd be my rules. Period.

I mean yeah, I personally think it's a lot of do over nothing. I'm not a vegetarian. But, vegetarian issues or whatever, the only person that's possibly hurt is the owner. The former customer can go have a salad anywhere. If this actually upset other customers, the owner would feel the effects of his own choices. On the other hand, if a greater number people thought that showed a committment to stand behind the health and 'moral' issues of his/her belief in the value of strict adherence to vegetarianism, that just might help business, huh?

On the other hand, in some other parts of the world, that restaurant owner might have the United Carnivores Action Front on his doorstep....

What no-one seems to have thought of is the smell. I would think that any vegetarian would feel put off by the smell of warmed up chicken dinner. Anyone who has used chicken baby food will know that it smells....of chicken.I think the owner had a point.

I think it's a bit stupid to ask the staff of a vegetarian restaurant to heat up a jar of chicken baby food. Of course the issue of cross contamination was just an excuse from the manageress to show how cross she was!! If the manageress is Welsh, I have a pretty good idea what went on behind the closed doors to the kitchen...

The woman herself is a vegetarian and her older son eats vegetarian. She had a jar of baby food that contained small amount of chicken because her doctor recommended it for her baby, so of course she followed his advice.

The restaurnt refused to warm the jar up, saying the microwave was broken. When the woman then asked for warm water to heat it up, they asked her to leave. THAT, my friends, is extreme. She even brought her own spoon to feed the baby, so the utensils would not even have been compromised.

I was a vegetarian for a time and I know many. Everybody knows that babies need to eat special foods, too, and they 1) don't have a choice in the matter and 2) don't have special restaurants catering to their needs.

This restaurnat was out of line, IMO, for asking them to leave. Refusing to heat up the jar, fine, but making a woman with a baby leave a restaurant while she's in the middle of feeding her child (and not bothering single person there) is the height of insensitivity. YAY for them, they have their vegetarian principles--but where are their human ones?

AllyPally,

"If the manageress is Welsh, I have a pretty good idea what went on behind the closed doors to the kitchen... "

Please explain! I'm having a slow day...

I mean that the Welsh are not backwards in coming forwards. I know because my mum is Welsh!!

I wonder if the restaurant was concerned that heating up the food would send the smell of chicken into the kitchen and dining room. It doesn't take a lot of chicken (a bit of broth would do it) to release that chicken aroma into the air and that's a kind of contamination--I know my in-laws and vegetarian friends can smell even a bit of meat quite easily. The restaurant owner was right to be worried that a vegetarian could walk into the restaurant and smell CHICKEN...suppose that next customer was a food critic for a vegetarian magazine? The restaurant was within its rights to refuse to heat up the food. I'm still surprised the woman took along some food with meat in it to a vegetarian restaurant and expected them to heat it up for her. She could just have easily brought along a jar of squash or apple sauce and fed the baby the meat-containing food at home either before or after the meal.

BTilke, I totally agree. There are hundreds of restaurants she could have gone to with this kind of request. As others have pointed out, the rules suddenly change when vegetarians are expected to bend their rules. This wouldn't be an issue if it was a question of religion (albeit vegetarianism is embraced by many religions)

I'm absolutely with the restaurant too. I read this thread last night but it was my bed time so I left it to today to post.

Others have since made the points I would have made.

I can't understand why she couldn't feed the baby vegetarian food for this meal and introduce the meat recommended by the doctor in a different meal that day.

And that's quite apart from the doctors advice being good or bad (I don't know enough to comment on that) and also quite apart from the fact that, if the baby did need to ingest more meat protein it doesn't seem that there was much of that in the dish in issue.