Happy Cow

            As a blog meant for new vegans and vegetarians – not just the old-timers – it would probably be helpful to highlight useful tools at our disposal.  The Happy Cow website is one such tool that my wife and I have used countless times in the past.  I seriously don’t know what we’d do without it.

            For those unfamiliar to the site, it’s basically one giant catalogue of restaurants that serve vegan and/or vegetarian food all over the world.  That’s right – all over the world!  How cool is that?  If you’re a newbie to the vegan world and wondering, “Well, where can I go since Red Lobster is no longer an option?” this is the place to visit!  It’s super easy to use, too.

            The site lets you enter in a location on its main page and from there you can narrow the search.  Not only can you specify your search for vegan or vegetarian restaurants, but you can also list veg-friendly restaurants (omni-restaurants that serve a few vegetarian dishes) and what they call “stores n’ more” (grocery stores, B&Bs, etc.).  The fact that you can list vegetarian B&Bs is pretty sweet.  Since my wife and I try to travel as much as possible, this feature would come in handy if we ever needed to use it.  Then you just list the radius you want to travel and more.  Once you’ve completed all the requirements you want to search for, the results show up on the bottom with a map displaying their locations.

            We’ve not only used it for searching out restaurants in our own area but also for numerous places we’ve been to on vacation.  We’ve been to Hawaii, Canada, Germany, England, Puerto Rico, and Costa Rica since going vegan and Happy Cow has listed places for nearly every town we’ve been to.  There have been times when I’ve worried about traveling to a country because I didn’t think there would be anything there for us to eat but every time I’ve been surprised at the amount of results I’ve gotten.  And it doesn’t even seem to matter how remote the town may be, there always seems to be one veg-friendly place for us to stop at.  And on those rare occasions that no restaurant pops up, we make due at some generic fast food place like Subway since it seems every country has one of those.

            Now, there are a few times when a restaurant hasn’t either been there or it’s been closed down or it was vegetarian when it was supposed to be vegan (or vice versa).  It happens (most recently for a vegan soul restaurant, Yah’s Cuisine, in Chicago that was closed down when there was no warning on either Happy Cow or even the main site for Yah’s) but it mostly happens when we visit a place out in the middle of nowhere and that usually only happens in foreign countries.  In the States, Canada, and England, we have had good luck using the site.

            Besides the restaurant listings, the site also has other uses.  You can join the site and give reviews and talk in forums with other vegans/vegetarians (a good way to build support).  They also have their own blog and shop.  They also list a bunch of different sub-topics you can search on their site to help old and new vegetarians (like an ingredients list, animal rights information, travel info, and tips on going vegan).  So, if you haven’t been to the site, I highly suggest bookmarking it and downloading the mobile app.

            Yes, I am on Happy Cow.  However, I haven’t been on the site for very long so I haven’t reviewed many places.  If you want to look me up there, too, then find me under ‘Ben Reilly’.  If you’re a comic book nerd like me, then you know that is a character in the Spider-Man comics.

            For those of you who have used the site before, what have your experiences been like?  Has it been a pretty reliable site for you to use?

            Until next time, keep calm and vegan on!

            You can follow Happy Cow on Twitter at @happycow

            You can also find them on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and a ton of other places.

My Pre-Vegan Days

            I thought I’d start things out by describing my pre-vegan days before we jump into anything crazy or involved.  I think this might be particularly useful since a lot of people think there’s just one path to going vegan or one reason for going vegan, but that’s not the case, obviously.  When ever somebody says they recently went vegan, if you’re an omnivore and if you’re being honest, probably thought they went vegan because they didn’t want to hurt cute, little, baby animals.  You probably pictured that person cuddling a baby calf.

            And what’s wrong with that?  I mean, have you SEEN baby calves?  I think the real question is, why wouldn’t you want to cuddle a baby calf?

            But in reality there are many reasons why people go vegan.  My original reason was for health.  I wasn’t suffering from anything – I wasn’t at a doctor’s office listening to grim news about how I’d be dead in a year if I didn’t change my ways – but if there was a way to help prevent developing any chronic or debilitating illnesses and all I had to do was eat better, why not make the smart and easy choice?  

            But how was I even exposed to vegetarianism and veganism in the first place?
            I have my wife to thank for getting me initially on the vegetarian bandwagon.  She was the one who was suffering from a few health ailments and she was sick of it.  Sick of even going to the E.R. just once let alone numerous times to be treated.  She went vegetarian first and within just a few short months – on Thanksgiving, no less – she was vegan.  She had turned her lifestyle around 180 degrees in just months.  Her health problems had gone away in that time period and within the first year of going vegan, she was looking a hundred times better, too.  The best argument for a cause is to see the changes that are taking place right in front of your eyes.
            Yet, in those first few months, I was still in my pre-vegan “glory”.  For years prior to going vegetarian I had largely lost the interest in eating cow flesh.  I still ate hamburgers but I was sick to death of eating steaks and the like.  I think that has to do with the fact that I ate a lot of red meat as a kid/teenager.  I did eat a lot of meat and potatoes but there were still a good amount of veggies and fruits (compared to the average person, I suppose).  Granted, a lot of those veggies were of the frozen variety.  I did eat chicken and pig (bacon and pork chops) on a regular basis with sushi thrown in whenever I could.
            But my pre-vegan palette was pretty limited.  I hated avocadoes, beans, cauliflower, artichokes, and a whole host of things I could never see myself eating in a million years.  Sushi was as adventurous as I got.  If it wasn’t for my fast metabolism, my wife keeps telling me that I should really be a hundred pounds heavier than I am since all I ate were fast foods, pizzas, pastas, potatoes, and other ‘heavy’ foods.
            Even when I worked at a grocery store as a teenager and into my early twenties, and even though I saw tofu, Morning Glory products, and other vegan products, I always thought, “Ew, who eats this crap?”  I also had no idea what one would do with things such as kale or dandelion greens or collard greens or ginger root.  I look back on those days with a smile because I had NO idea what was in store and no idea how well acquainted I’d become with all of those products.  If it wasn’t an apple, an orange, a grape, or a banana, I basically didn’t have any interest in the fruit or veggie.
            So fast-forward several years later when my wife went vegetarian.  She plainly stated at the time that I didn’t have to go vegetarian but that she would not be making any meat-based meals.  If I wanted to eat what she made – cool.  I could also eat whatever I wanted outside of the home but I was on my own, otherwise.  Because I have no cooking skills whatsoever beyond making pasta dishes, I was all for trying vegetarian dishes.  To my idiotic surprise, I loved nearly every single dish she made.  The foods were so delicious and varied!  I had never tasted anything so good in my life.  When she went vegan, I kept eating whatever she was putting in front of me.  It seems silly to think that I was surprised with how full of flavor the dishes were since they were generally using more ingredients and more spices than just plain meat and potato dishes.
            Outside of the home was a bit different.  I didn’t eat any red meat any more but I still ate chicken, pig, and fish (sushi).  I also kept drinking cow’s milk and eating pizza with cheese on it.  However, I noticed that I slowly began to lose the interest in eating animals.  As those first few months of being vegan came to a close for my wife, I had nearly phased out chicken and pig from my diet.

Perhaps it was because of all the information my wife was bombarding me with about animals, factory farming, health benefits of going vegan, and anything else she could soak up on her vegan journey.  Let me point out that when I say ‘bombard’, I truly mean that in the nicest way possible. (ha)  She was so excited about everything she was learning and I was seeing the physical changes she was going through since changing her eating habits, that it was hard NOT to take it all in and get just as excited and amazed.

Finally, my heart and brain just couldn’t take it any more.  I had taken in too much knowledge to ignore that veganism was the way to go.  Nobody told me to stop eating animals.  I didn’t do it because my wife ‘made’ me (a ridiculous notion best suited for a 1950s sitcom than the new millennium).  So, almost two months after my wife went vegan I decided to go vegetarian in January of 2011 and I haven’t looked back.  I didn’t go fully vegan until 2013 but even before 2013, I was mostly vegan with the exception of eating cookies or cupcakes that were made with animal products.

I’ll talk about the transition and the changes I noticed in another entry.  For now, I think this is a good start.  Sorry for the length of writing!

What’s YOUR story of going vegetarian or vegan?  Were any of you big meat-eaters before going vegetarian/vegan?  If you’re still an omnivore that’s curious about going vegetarian, what are the things you see as roadblocks (mental or real) to making the transition?  I want to hear from you all!
           With that, I bid you all adieu for now.  (Still thinking of a catchy closing phrase.  Hmmm)

P.S. - The photo (I'm 99% sure) is from Farm Sanctuary, which is an AMAZING charity and should be supported.