I understand, irony an' all.
But, if you have not eaten animal protean for three years, and your wife can die from it because of an allergy (brain tumor, part of which is on her pituitary making her body do all kinds of crazy shit, some of which is an toxic allergy to animal protean) going to the hospital because your shit-head server is too slack to go ask the chef after saying "I'm not sure, let me ask", is not funny at all.
After all that time, I did not eat it because I did the diet with her and after a while meat and dairy made me sick as a dog, even one bite.
We would tell them, "she will get very ill if there is just a little in the soup, are you sure?", they would lie right to our face.
If they did not know and said something other than "I do not know", it is an intentional lie.
Used to happen all the time when we would go out... people are morons.
If we were unscrupulous, we would be rich right now.

allergic to animal protein? is that possible? that sounds . . . life threatening

Why?

well, because so much of what people eat is animal protein. Like you said, it can sneak into sauces and such.

A vegan diet can be very healthy.
Most don't do it right, our Dr. said we were one of three (speaking of us as a couple) he had seen do it in his career as a Dr.
He said it is not hard, you just have to do it.

We worked out a tough question over lunch at work one day: are vegans against the drinking of human breast milk?

I don't think they are--by no stretch of the imagination can it be considered harmful to the providing animal. What answer did you come up with?

We didn't quite figure it out. We're talking adult drinking here, not baby-feeding. This could be the loophole for vegans - not animal protein allergic people, but the other vegans - to have all the dairy they like, so long as the woman is in favor of the arrangement, right? I mean, in theory, you could make cheese, sour cream, butter --

But what if the women are employed to produce breast milk?

adult drinking. oh. that's fairly squicky to me, vegetarian or no.

Alex James (bassist from Blur) tried to get Gordon Ramsey to try a cappuccino made with breastmilk the other day. He took a mouthful and then spit it out, unable to swallow. I found that strangely prissy from a man who advocates eating offal.

I doubt I'd like it (I've heard it's very sweet) but if it was freely given and I didn't know the donor I'd be happy to try it. Knowing the donor would be too much like exchanging bodily fluids - too personal for me to accept for a food product.

I think an industry based on breastmilk would be open to exploitation - sadly. If I knew it was freely given - I mean I really knew - then it seems reasonable.