Everything Vegan in Chicago

How droll right? Well yup, we’ve got a group on there too. Join up!

People who are vegan often take care to watch their language to avoid speciesist or condescending connotations associated with words we were raised saying. For example: “animal companion” has replaced “pet” in some circle to equalize the relationship between non-humans and their care takers. “Meat” might become “flesh” to shed the anonymity of the animal for which it came. Etc etc. While many may roll their eyes and scoff something about political correctness ruining these United States words do have meaning which is why we use them and I think coming to a common understanding will help us communicate our true intentions. I’ll be the first to bend, slice, dice and mix and match words but there are a few instances that kinda peeve me out and help illustrate what vegan really means.

“Veggie”- Now i understand the desire to be “all-inclusive” of the wide variety of diet based lifestyles but when referring to veganism say “vegan”! There’s no shame in letting your true intention known. Everybody can eat a vegan diet regardless of their personal restrictions so “vegan” is the true all-inclusive form. That brings me to:

“Diet”- If you truly are vegan only for the dietary aspects and wear fur, beat up on baby seals and kick puppies* then that’s fine to use “diet” in conjunction with veganism but for goddsakes people veganism is much more than about what you eat! It so happens that a majority of animal exploitation revolves around food but it’s not exclusive to it. Next time you throw a vegan event try doing it withOUT food for example. Do not define yourself through your diet. I know it’s a trap one could easily fall into especially when we’re always reading labels or what have you but get your nose outta there, breathe!

“I am a vegan” - Vegan as a noun versus an adjective. When we say “I am a vegan” we are making veganism about us when it isn’t at all. We are people who have decided to be vegan. This makes teh concept much more available to people around us. Let’s not do the work for them and box ouselves up into a cute little category which others can easily dismiss. Say it with me: “I AM vegan”, “I am a person who is vegan.”**

Gendered pronouns for animals - So we have people all up in a fuss for using gendered pronouns to describe people and then also for using neutral “it” pronouns for non-human animals. What the hell is going on here. Oh i dunno*** but gendered pronouns are here to stay for a while i guess and if you refer to a non-human animal as “she” or “he” that might help raise the status of that being into an area that might spark empathy for that creature. Saying “it” when referring to a non-human is something the best animal advocates will slip up on, i don’t sweat it but i do try to make a conscious effort. Not all animals are easily identifiable to a particular sex but that extra work by investigating or bringing the problem to light is good practice.

“animal” - To be factually correct “animal” can mean any flesh & bone creature on this Earth. Further more referring to other creatures as “animal” sets them apart from us when what we really need to do is highlight the similarities. “Non-human animal” is nice to use but darn if that also doesn’t get to be a mouthful at times. Use it to punctuate a point and it can help tear down speciesist preconceptions.

“I can’t eat that” - When somebody offers a vegan**** something and they say “oh i can’t eat that” it makes veganism look dogmatic. It may be like that for some but that’s just a sad state of affairs. Anyway try saying “Oh I don’t/won’t eat that” to imply veganism is a conscious choice and not a disability to be pitied. They’ll say “why” and you can say “BECAUSE DAIRY IS MURDER BITCH!”. Holy crap i am kidding! That brings me to more of a semantical grey area and that is:

“Meat is murder OMG!” - It’s fine to think non-human animal eating people are murderers but screaming that in their faces is not going to endear them to the vegan cause. You were most likely just like these people at one point so try identifying with them instead of putting them on trial. Try thinking of it this way: The plight of animals is a problem and ask these people to help solve it. This is more of an advocacy issue and not necessarily semantical so i’ll stop here for now.

After all that being said please make veganism personal and don’t let xxAnimalxRightsxGuy213xx or
Hippie_Yoga_Star_Flower_Dood or even Dave.Dumbass.Dandelion berate you into adopting their style of veganism. The best form of advocacy is one that comes from the heart and is honest. Find your reasons to be vegan, ask others about theirs and share with those who are not…

…yet.

* I’m kidding people, get some humor!
** I often shortcut “Those vegans” or “Vegans like us” etc but for some reason that’s less insidious than “a vegan”.
***Frankly i find gender identification in language tiresome but it’s not my battle at the moment.
****see how i did that? :p

To help bring the best vegan goodness to the people we here at VeganChicago have adopted Yelp.com as our main tool for reviews. After much research and work we feel that this is best way to bring the most up-to-date information to the most people and Yelp is a damn good website for it.

But we can’t do this on our own. The power of the community is no match for a handful of volunteers so we ask you not for anything droll like money, or volunteer time but to join the Yelp community and mention veganism in your reviews. It’s easy, fun and allows you to advocate veganism simply by doing what you are doing right now, participating in the online community.

Write about your vegan places or no so great experiences. Friend us at veganchicago.yelp.com. Blaze a path for other vegans new and old, spread the word and bolster the network of information. We want everybody to see that veganism is important to us. We want them to see the word and have it become part of the mainstream vernacular.

Of course we also want to support the businesses that make the effort to provide products or services that are free of cruelty and suffering. How is anybody going to discover veganism if they never hear about it? There’s no shame in our game and there’s no more efficient use of time than to make your voices heard on the internet.

So please give it a shot. Write some reviews, make some lists and give us a shout at veganchicago.yelp.com.

Thanks!

-dave.dandelion

ps- We are not affiliated with yelp.com in any way other than just contributing as a regular member of that community. We just really like their site!

Cheese pizza is the bane of vegans everywhere. Not only is it a delicious comfort food that alot of us have grown up with but the social aspect can leave us ostracized from the group. Now before I digress into a sociological analysis of the tomato on bread ritual lemme just say pizza is good and we miss it!

Of course when I say pizza I mean the cheese variety. There are alotta vegans who are just fine and dandy with cheeseless “pizzas” and veggies but yes there are some of us who yearn for the gooey drippy cheesy kind. With no real decent vegan cheese product to turn to the “Evil Cheese Pizza” (see artist’s rendition above) has plagued our community stealing vegans back into the “slackto-lacto-vegetarian” camp. Taking a clandestine bite of cow cheese pizza one may think “oh well, no turning back now” and go back to dairy eating vegetarianism or nonhuman animal flesh eating. Part of this blame I would contend lays upon the hardline vegans who guard their purity with dogmatic voraciousness policing other vegans and setting them up for failure. This of course is a sad state of affairs and misses the whole point of veganism but we won’t dwell. So back to the pizza/food thing.

For just about every single kind of crappy american food product or dish there is a vegan alternative that we can turn to in times of craving. It may surprise people to know that other people who are vegan didn’t go that route because they hated the taste of dead animals. They are yummy tasting, we grew up on them! But that doesn’t make it right. Luckily we can still have the same foods and even *shudder* explore other cultures who by the way have been around a helluva alot longer than New North Americans and have a rich variety of foods and flavors.

But PIZZA! Why oh why can’t anyone make such a simple thing as a vegan pizza in this town of Chicago who LOVES to claim a whole niche of pizza (mmmm deep dish!)? i aint talking some hippie pizza at some restaurant who put it on their menu as an afterthought but a hardcore pizzera that makes their crust fat and chewy (for real Chicagoans) or thin and crispy (for weirdos) ;). How hard would it be to instead of reaching for that cow cheese just keep some vegan cheese off to the side and put that on? The vegan community in Chicago is big and growing my friend. We’ve been sharing the secrets and getting together in meetings and social events. We’ve hacked the menus of local establishments and made our OWN vegan cheese pizzas supplementing them with Vegan Gourmet Cheese tweaking it out just so with crude implements of squirt bottles and broilers to replicate the food we fondly remember from our childhoods. The company or restaurant that could serve vegan pizza I think would do well to include a large part of the market for little investment.

Welp ok anyway, my WHOLE POINT is that vegan cheese pizza has indeed appeared in Chicago. Local entrepreneurs Chicago Soy Dairy who make the ever popular Tempation vegan ice cream have concocted a vegan cheese they call “Teese” which is the closest analog to cow cheese I’ve tried so far! Look here’s a picture:

and another!

It is currently only at Whole Foods on Halsted where they can make you a pizza with it. ($11.99 per pizza with one ingredient and $1 for each ingredient after that). Word on the street is that Chicago Diner and other restaurants may also be serving this as their vegan cheese. We’ll keep and ear out for further developments. In the meantime if you have a vegan cheese pizza craving and would rather not brave one yourself get over to Whole Foods and ask for it by name!

EDIT: Now also available online! http://www.teesecheese.com/

The vegan fast food restaurant we all know and love is opening up a new location in Wicker Park at 1300 N. Milwaukee. Sylvia Watycha and Moshe Shalom are two righteous vegans who have filled an obvious gap in vegan cuisine and that’s vegan fast food! Be it burgers, hot dogs, chili cheese fries, BBQ bits,or shakes just to name a few, they got it covered. Sylvia and Moshe wear their ethics on their sleeves but try to make inroads with their unassuming fare and decor. It aint no hippie joint and you wont see lentils on the menu.

This new location was a year in the making and we’re glad to finally see an actual location being fleshed out of the corner of Milwaukee and Paulina. Sylvia wouldn’t give us an exact date and we can’t blame her but she hopes it will coincide with the anniversary of their first location which is March 10th.

When we’re on the southside we make sure to load up sacks of hedonistic vegan food to vice out on. Now that they’re north this is going to get very dangerous.

We are working on this site hoping to create a low maintenance portal for all things Vegan Chicago. We’re using Meetup.com for our events and Yelp.com for our reviews. Please login to those sites to take full advantage of the communities there. Represent!

Hello,

A few things have changed around here. I thought it would just be best to get it all out in one big ranty post for you to read at your discretion. Please feel free to add to the thread if you have further questions or comments.

Why we are now called “Vegan Chicago”Last year we merged with the EarthSaveChicago’s project VegChicago. Our intention was to make a bigger impact by tying in with an official non-profit. We worked hard on a website that could be a vegan guide to Chicago while using the already established meetup group for monthly events to bond the community. Well, over that past year I’ve sorta shifted my philosophy on a few things and have a new approach. Because of this I decided to revert our meetup group back to its original format but switch the name around to “Vegan Chicago”. (before the VegChicago merge we were “Chicago Vegan Meetup”) Continue reading →