Veggie-lifestyle sites LiveKindly.co and VegNews.com poked some fun at Jarrod Sutton, vice president of domestic marketing for the National Pork Board, over Labor Day weekend.

LiveKindly kicked off with the all-caps headline, “PORK BOARD VP SAYS VEGAN BEYOND SAUSAGES TASTE LIKE MEAT” with a first paragraph that read, “A member of the National Pork Board (NPB) … has admitted that vegan meat tastes like the real thing.”

Welllllllll — no, he didn’t say that.

VegNews was closer with its take: “NATIONAL PORK LOBBYIST TASTES VEGAN SAUSAGE … ADMITS IT’S PRETTY GOOD,” although he didn’t say that, either. And Sutton, who works for a checkoff-funded organization, isn’t a lobbyist.

What Sutton said in the original article in Pork Business was that the plant-based meat analogue products are “meat-like” but “have a ways to go in terms of texture. The flavor I’d say was close, just because they put [on] a lot of sauces and condiments.”

Furthermore, the comment was an aside in an article that otherwise is an overview of the meat analogue market segment, and what it’s growth means to pork producers and processors.

Asked for further comment, Sutton told Meatingplace in an email, “The plant-based products that I tried (Beyond Meat burger and original brat) are close to tasting like protein, but there is no mistaking these products as plant-based.

“The brat is, as you would expect, full of seasonings and spices and the burger is topped with all the fixings including bread, cheese, lettuce and tomato. Both products have the look, but in my opinion, neither is close to the texture of meat protein. This will be a hard sell for meat-eaters.”

Cave lectorum. Reader, beware.

Misrepresentations are the order of the day in media, and that applies across the board. Consider the warning from the North Carolina Pork Council as Hurricane Florence was pounding the coast:

In advance of the storm, and since its onset, the North Carolina Pork Council has seen widespread instances of inaccurate reporting in the media about the pork industry in the state. For example, on Sunday, Sept. 16, the Associated Press published and distributed nationally a photograph that labeled two garages as a hog farm. In previous years, we have seen photos of municipal waste plants, poultry houses and other agricultural facilities inaccurately labeled as pig farms. We have seen barns that have been empty for multiple years characterized as active hog farms. We urge caution, especially in a breaking news environment where initial information is often inaccurate. It is precisely in these first hours and days that activists with an agenda seek to exploit the media — or the media simply gets it wrong. Our request: Beware of what you hear about hog farms during Hurricane Florence.

It’s said that journalism is the first rough draft of history, but it shouldn’t be that rough.

I downloaded an extension to my Chrome browser recently, called NewsGuard. It’s the creation of Steven Brill, and it purports to “restore trust and accountability” to news reports on the web. The company’s team reviews a website as a source of information, and gives it a rating for reliability. NewsGuard aims to be above politics: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and MSNBC all are rated “generally maintains basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” So does Consumer Reports.

VegNews.com is still being evaluated, NewsGuard says. So is FSIS. LiveKindly’s YouTube channel gets this warning: “This website publishes content from its users that it does not vet. Information from this source may not be reliable.”

Meatingplace doesn’t have a NewsGuard rating yet (but we’ve asked for one).

The upshot is, as sources of information have proliferated it has become ever more imperative that that information be doublechecked, that multiple sources be consulted for a fuller picture of any issue or news development.

And you don’t need a computer program to tell you that.

Oh no, he didn’t! No, really. He didn’t.

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