I feel like my normal response when someone tells me they are vegan is, do you mind picking the lunch spot then? I struggle to find vegan friendly spots.
HappyCow can be a good resource for this sort of thing. Every time it gets mentioned, though, an old Smosh skit gets stuck in my head.
I always struggle with Happy Cow and its filter options. You can either filter for ‘vegan sites’ or ‘vegetarian options’ but not ‘vegan options’.
Option 1 will only show restaurants and cafés that are fully vegan, so this will bring the list down to almost nothing in most smaller or medium-sized cities.
Option 2 shows all restaurants that serve also vegetarian food but not necessarily vegan options. So this leaves me with a huge list.
I’d like filters like ‘has at least two vegan options declared in the menu’ or ‘offers vegan options on request’.
Missing “So?”.
My favorite, as a long time vegetarian and recent vegan, is “do you know what meat tastes like???”
No. I don’t. I haven’t had meat since I was like six. No clue what it tastes like.
This is the attitude of a lot of non-vegetarian catering chefs when they are catering vegetarian meals. You absolutely do get protein deficiency, because they just take meat-oriented recipes and replace the meat with eggplant. Or they just put lettuce salad, and like nothing else.
(I do occasional volunteer work for a pretty progressive organization that probably has some vegetarians in it. They feed us, but sometimes they are forced to use cheap crappy convention center catering that doesn’t know how to cook vegetarian food.)
