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Wow, another national chain is offering vegan fare! 7-Eleven has been selling prepared vegan sandwiches in the Philadelphia region. According to the Philadelphia Daily News, the corporation is considering vegan convenience-food products for the entire chain. (Note: I could find no mention of this on the 7-Eleven website.) As Foodeater commented the other day, we vegans are taking over the world. OK, she said we'd be taking over Los Angeles, but you can extrapolate from there...

But this brings me back to my point that going meatless is becoming mainstream. Today you can go into a convenience store and pick up a prepared meatless sandwich, or pop into your local coffee shop and buy a vegan brownie. How exciting is that?! I'm not saying that we should rush out and start eating prepared foods at every meal. We all know eating prepared foods may mean that we're probably consuming preservatives and additives that might not be good for us. Food manufacturers are ultimately out to make money after all. But it certainly makes life a little easier knowing these options are out there.

I hope these products do well in their test markets. I know I'm not the target demographic here. Personally, I don't see myself frequenting 7-Eleven for sandwiches, but I have been on one too many road trips in the recent past where my (questionable) vegan option was potato chips. It would be nice to know I could hop in the car without any forethought -- that if I got hungry along the way, I could pull off at some highway rest stop and actually have a choice of things to eat.

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I wish I'd seen this information on vegan activism when I was attacked for being a "damned, stupid half-vegan" (see our post Compassion Will Cure More Sins Than Condemnation).

Vegan Outreach has a particular segment on activism entitled, Busting the Vegan Police, in which they say:

It is imperative for us to realize that if our veganism is a statement for animal liberation, veganism cannot be an exclusive, ego-boosting club. Rather, we must become the mainstream. Fostering the impression that "it’s so hard to be vegan–animal products are in everything," and emphasizing animal products where the connection to animal suffering is tenuous, works against this by allowing most to ignore us and causing others to give up the whole process out of frustration.

The way veganism is presented to a potential vegan is of major importance. The attractive idea behind being a "vegan" is reducing one’s contribution to animal exploitation. Buying meat, eggs, and/or dairy creates animal suffering–animals will be raised and slaughtered specifically for these products. But if the by-products are not sold, they will be thrown out or given away. As more people stop eating animals, the by-products will naturally fade, so there is no real reason to force other people to worry about them in order to call themselves "vegan."

We want a vegan world, not a vegan club.

Amen.

Obviously, this veganer-than-thou attitude is something that really bothers me. I agree with Vegan Outreach. If the objective of veganism is to reduce the suffering and exploitation of animals, then to criticize and condemn people who drink Guinness, for example, because it's refined with Isinglass (see this post) isn't going to accomplish that goal. Instead of demanding that people who don't concern themselves with the animal by-products in their food label themselves as "strict vegetarians" perhaps we should allow the term vegan to encompass a broader perspective. As Vegan Outreach points out when fewer animals are consumed, fewer by-products are created. In turn, this will result in the cost of animal by-products rising so that cheaper alternatives will be sought out. The basic principles of supply and demand.

The definition of Vegan in Wikipedia states:

Veganism is a philosophy and lifestyle that seeks to exclude the use of animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose. Vegans do not use or consume animal products of any kind.

And as Convenient Vegan says in her post:

...the words “seeks to exclude.” This because it is impossible to assure that everything you eat, everything you wear, every part of how you live is completely free of cruelty to animals. The tires on your car – or your bike – were probably created with the assistance of animal by-products. The organic food you eat might well involve the deaths of many little insects. The materials used to build your home may include some products that involved the use of animal products in their production.

In order to bring veganism, and therefore animal rights, into the mainstream it might behoove us all to rethink where we draw our lines.

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Earlier this week, I wrote about the Best Places to Live - If You're a Vegan, as compiled by Peta. Portland won the distinction of being the most vegetarian friendly large city in the USA. At the end of my post I indicated that I was surprised by some of the results. Jason of TasteBetter.com suggested per capita statistics could skew the data one way or the other. That made sense to me. So, now I wanted to know: which city has the greatest concentration of vegans per capita? But how to go about researching this? Enter: Google Trends!

Google Trends is a fairly new component of the Google family of software applications. It tracks the popularity of search terms and ranks them by city, state, country, language, etc. It also graphs the number of searches of the particular searched-for-term and attributes spikes in search activity to specific articles / posts.

And when providing data about a region, Google Trends doesn't just total up the quantity of searches by that region; it grades on a curve... To quote the Google Trends Help page:

"For counting and ranking cities, Google Trends first looks at a sample of all Google searches to determine the cities from which we received the most searches for your first term. Then, for those top cities, Google Trends calculates the ratio of searches for your term coming from each city divided by total Google searches coming from the same city."

So what did I find out? Google Trends won't tell us which city has the largest population of vegans. It tells us which city's or state's population searches for the term "vegan" most, per capita. Here's the list:

So according to Google Trends, over the past 12 months, Portland (as a city) and Oregon (as a state) are the locations in the USA with highest search ranking for the term "vegan." Not quite what I was looking for, but interesting nonetheless.

Extrapolating from that data, it does look like Portland, Oregon is the winner here in the U.S. If you're interested in checking other locations, click on the Google Trends link above and select the location you're inquiring about. Canberra, Australia and Brighton, UK are the winners in their countries. (I didn't look at all their locations, but Nepal and Monaco didn't have enough traffic to warrant a graph.)

I hope I didn't bore you all silly. This kind of stuff is a lot of fun for a "stat head" (read: nerd) like myself. Jane's sitting on the couch rolling her eyes, and I'm off to look at more data from Australia to Zimbabwe.

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Veganism is gaining ground. And there can be no doubt about that when Starbuck's starts offering vegan baked goods!

I found this post today, talking about how Starbuck's has been modifying their menu to appeal to a more health-conscious consumer. They are offering low-fat versions of some of their beverages, and vegan baked goods, all in an effort to regain some of their waning market share.

GreenChefs (Jana) writes:

But what about the high calorie cakes and brownies that are so tempting to go with your Skinny Soy Mocha on an afternoon Starbucks run. Now, to keep up with the virtuous “skinny” theme, Starbucks has added 1.5 g fat, low sugar, dairy and egg free brownies to their menu for $1.95. I’m not a Starbucks fan or a coffee fan for that matter, so I haven’t tried these. According to some reviewers they are pretty good and they say the chocolate icing tastes like any other rich icing, yet the cake part is a bit on the chewier side. They are not organic, but are obviously a healthier option.

In looking at the Starbuck's website, I couldn't find anything listed about the brownies, at least not in our immediate area. Which is shocking, since we live in Los Angeles, one of those places you'd expect to be considered vegan-friendly (see our post Best Places to Live --If You're a Vegan).

In an interesting side note, Starbuck's was closed tonight. Yes, you read that correctly. Every Starbuck's in the entire United States was closed for three hours this evening to re-train their staff (see this article in the San Francisco Gate). Dunkin Donuts took advantage of this opportunity to offer FREE lattes (see Dunkin Donuts Press Release). It's days like this that I wish I drank coffee, Now, when are they going to offer vegan donuts? Mmmm, donuts...   It can't be long now, it seems like everyone is going vegan!