Who is Vegan Chicago?
What are reviews & Yelp?
What are events & Meetup?
Why vegan?
Why not “vegetarian”?
Who is Vegan Chicago?
Vegan Chicago is a response to the lack of vegan info in Chicago and the ever growing vegan community’s need for it. We started as a Meetup group back in 2003 and have been doing monthly vegan meetups ever since! In 2007 we partnered up with EarthSaveChicago as “VegChicago”. in 2008 we adjusted our approach and struck back out on our own as a newly reformed “Vegan Chicago”. The group is lead by Chicago native and long time vegan, David Sutherland with a loose knit group of volunteers who mostly help organize monthly Meetups and act as a Board of Directors.
What are reviews & Yelp?
The reviews we host on this home site are pulled in via an RSS feed from Yelp.com. After many years of toiling over creating our own proprietary review site and managing business information and comments we learned that the task was too herculean for a small band of volunteers to manage and did a disservice to the community. Our new approach is to allow sites to do what they do best and link to them directly. Yelp.com looks to be the best review site we can find and the community there is great and supportive. We encourage everybody to go and sign up an account. If you would like to find us please go to veganchicago.yelp.com. We would love to be your Yelp friend. Also please make your own “vegan” Yelp list so other people seeking vegan goods can benefit from your experience!
What are events?
Every month on the first Saturday at noon we meet at a restaurant in Chicago to meet and mingle while eating vegan food in company that is actually friendly to veganism. No need to worry about what food is vegan or being defensive about being vegan, we take care of all of that. The restaurants we choose are those that either are completely vegans or make efforts to serve vegan options. We feel this is a win-win that allows for vegans to try out restaurants and to support the restaurants with a little business and promotion.
These “meetups” are handled through a website called Meetup.com. To sign up for an event please see out page over at vegan.meetup.com/11.
Veganism defined (by the Vegan Society):
Vegan [vee-gn]: Veganism denotes a philosophy and way of living that seeks to exclude, as far as possible, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, nonhuman animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, nonhumans and the environment. Vegans avoid all animal produce: meat (animal flesh), dairy, eggs, honey, and their derivatives or byproducts.
We believe veganism to be a moral baseline that resolves responsibility and peace that we strive for through active daily choices.
Why not “vegetarian”?
Specifically as how the word is commonly used, “vegetarian” often includes dairy and eggs. We often say lacto-ovo-vegetarian to denote the specific consumption of animal products. Our veganism tends to err on the ethical aspects while lacto-ovo-vegetarians are diet based. To keep a consistent focus and be as inclusive as possible we only advocate veganism. Anybody can eat vegan! We welcome everybody regardless of what they eat, wear or do to check us out.