How Vegan Brief is made

The morning wire

Every morning the Field Desk reads about 70 sources across the six categories the brief covers: Research & Nutrition, Food & Recipes, Innovation, Activism & Animals, Law & Policy, and Wins & Culture. That range is the point. A cultivated meat approval is a science story, a policy story, and a dinner story at once, and no single outlet covers all three sides of it. The wire runs from nutrition journals and food-tech trade press to advocacy groups, regulators, recipe developers, and the grassroots discussion where vegans pressure-test what actually works. The full category map is public.

Stories that surface in several outlets are pulled into one entry, so you read each development once, with the full picture, instead of six partial versions of it. Every entry names its sources, and the numbered references on each brief link straight to the articles they came from.

The check: five grades, applied in public

The heart of the method is a rule about claims. Any load-bearing health, climate, cost, or "first ever" claim in a story gets quoted verbatim, never paraphrased, and graded against the evidence behind it. The grade sits next to the quote in the brief, so a peer-reviewed trial and a press release can never carry the same weight on the page.

Proven Replicated evidence, a regulatory decision, or a court or official record.
Solid Peer-reviewed work with a sound design, honest limits noted.
Early A preprint, a small sample, an observational result, or an animal or cell model.
Company claim The company’s or campaign’s own unaudited figure or framing.
Overstated The cited evidence does not support the claim as made.

Two things about how the grades are applied. First, the claim is graded as made, not the topic: a "99% cheaper" line from a press release is a Company claim even when the underlying science is promising, because the figure is the company's own. Second, a Company claim grade does not mean false. It means the only source for the number is the party that benefits from it, and you deserve to know that at breakfast.

Primary sources first

Grading a study by its press coverage is how hype gets laundered, so the pipeline goes and gets the paper. Study identifiers behind the day's coverage, DOIs and PubMed listings, are resolved through Crossref and PubMed so the actual abstract sits next to the journalism when the brief is written. A bounded research step can pull in a handful of further primary documents the day's stories lean on, from an allowlist of journals, regulators, and official records. The check is graded against those documents, and the brief only ever quotes from sources gathered into that day's pool.

The gates: what has to pass before an issue ships

Checking is not a vibe here; it is software that runs on every issue, every morning, after the brief is written and before it is published.

The quality gate, which fails closed. An issue that is too thin, missing sections, or built on too few articles does not ship at all. On a genuinely bad morning you get silence instead of filler. Nothing publishes by default; the gate has to say yes.
The citation check. Every numbered reference in the brief is verified to point at the article the prose names. A reference that drifted gets flagged loudly for the desk.
The quote gate. Every quoted claim and every headline figure is checked, character for character, against the cited source's text. A quote or number that appears in no source stops the issue from publishing, full stop. That is the one error this brief is not allowed to survive.

The public Record

Grades that ship do not expire at midnight. Every published check is filed on the Record, under whoever made the claim, and stays there: 76 claims and counting. When later evidence settles a claim either way, the entry stays and the update is added. Promised follow-ups get their own ledger, and items that come due are fed back into future mornings so a "we will know by December" line actually gets revisited in December.

The reference shelves, audited every morning

The evergreen questions get their own pages: The Evidence (35 articles on what the science actually shows) and Is it vegan? (88 ingredients from the label small print). Both shelves are built on verbatim primary-source quotes, and every quote is archived when the page is written. Each morning, before the site deploys, an audit re-verifies every quoted span on both shelves against those archived sources; a page that no longer matches its receipts gets flagged before it can mislead anyone. A separate freshness guard flags any shelf that has gone more than 30 days without a read-through, and each read-through is stamped on the shelf with a dated review line.

Storylines and the long game

Fights that run for years, cultivated meat approvals, labeling laws, corporate welfare pledges, are kept as Storylines: dated, sourced timelines with a ledger of what was promised and what was delivered. 31 of the 31 tracked storylines are active right now. When a fight resolves, it graduates into the history of veganism, whose own quotes are verified the same way: the daily "on this day" piece re-fetches every page it cites and keeps only the quotes it can confirm word for word.

Who makes this

Vegan Brief is written and edited at the Field Desk, and the desk is the author: there is no invented byline and no persona. The framework is human-designed, the six categories, the grading rules, the questions asked of every story, and the day's articles are read against that fixed framework every morning, with the checks above run by machine. Ownership and funding are disclosed on the About page: independent, reader-funded, no money from anyone the brief covers.

The honest limits

The wire has edges. About 70 sources is a lot of vegan world, and it is not all of it. A story none of those sources ran is a story the brief misses that morning.
A grade is a snapshot, not a systematic review. The check rates the evidence behind a claim as cited that day. Early work can firm up, and Solid findings can wobble; when that happens the Record entry gets a dated update, but no grade is a final verdict.
Speed costs depth some mornings. The brief is written and checked in hours to be on time for breakfast. The slower, fuller answers live on the shelves, which get the monthly read-throughs.
Machines catch misquotes, not misjudgments. The gates verify that every quote and figure is real and sourced. Whether a story deserved more skepticism is a judgment, and judgments can be wrong. When one is, it goes on the corrections page.

Checking our work

The receipts are public by design: the Record for every grade, the corrections ledger for every published error, and a numbered source list on every brief. If something here does not hold up, email hello@veganbrief.com; it reaches a real person at the desk.

How Vegan Brief is made.