Living Vegan in the City of Angels: Still Not as Easy as You Might Think...

I just returned from a week in Los Angeles with my family. Everybody had their own reasons for wanting to visit the City of Angels. My companion and I were excited to sample the many vegan delicacies the city had to offer. Before visiting, I'd read a lot of articles in magazines and on the Web about the proliferation of vegan joints in the land o' sunshine & smog. In fact, Los Angeles has a reputation for being way ahead of the curve when it comes to vegan food options.

Turns out Los Angeles wasn't a whole hell of a lot more impressive when it came to the availability of vegan foods than where I live in Waterloo, Ontario. Sure, there are now numerous vegan restaurants in L.A. The website "Vegetarians in Paradise" offers a long list of vegan eateries in the greater Los Angeles (and not-so-great Los Angeles) area. I admit that in the short span of a week - with a very packed schedule - I wasn't able to dine in most of these joints.

But the real test of any city's vegan-friendliness boils down to how easy it is to find vegan products in non-vegan restaurants and in neighborhood markets. And in this department, Los Angeles didn't seem too terribly advanced. We ate out a lot on our trip, and many menus didn't have vegan foods. We even ate at one joint renowned for its healthy food (I won't name names - but I've linked to it here) and let's just say their vegan offerings were none too spectacular.

And the restaurants that served vegetarian/vegan food aren't necessarily staffed by people with a great deal of knowledge on the subject, as the Vegetarians in Paradise website notes:

Often vegetarian restaurants hire serving attendants who are not knowledgeable about ingredients in their dishes. The ultimate responsibility lies with you, the customer, to ask and ask again about ingredients that concern you. We'll do our best to be as informative as possible.

So as much as I loved getting back to Los Angeles, a city where I've spent a great deal of time in the past, I must say that like most other places, L.A.'s non-vegan community still has a ways to go to "beef up" (excuse the terrible pun) their vegan offerings.

Still, the city has improved. The wonderful actor/vegan Casey Affleck, who became a vegan in the mid-1990s, remembers a time when vegan food was damn near impossible to find in Los Angeles. The city, like the rest of North America, has made great strides. And it seems to have a thriving vegan community that spreads out far beyond the city limits. But real progress will be measured when vegans are no longer outcasts in their own communities, and they encounter menus at popular omnivore restaurants that make them feel welcome, too.

Mandatory Reading: "What's a Dog Worth?" in Los Angeles magazine - investigative journalism at its best

The recent issue of Los Angeles Magazine featured one of the best articles on life for dogs and cats inside of animal shelters that I've ever read. The article, called "What's a Dog Worth?" by Jesse Katz, was an amazing piece of investigative reporting. Warning: It is not for the squeamish of faint of heart. That's because the article takes you right into the middle of the packed Los Angeles animal shelters. A quote freak at the start of the article sets the tone: "Los Angeles kills more animals in its shelters than any other metropolitan area in the United States. For that to change, we will have to figure out what to do with the pets none of us want."

This article should be mandatory reading for every adult in North America. It is uncompromising. It is beautifully written. It is profoundly tragic. The author, Jesse Katz, introduces us a brave and kind-hearted Latino euthanasiast named Javier Lopez, who comes from a working-class East L.A. household. Lopez is the true hero of this story - a man who loves animals so much that he is willing to lovingly administer the substance that will take the life out of their bodies.

Lopez has his work cut out for him. Author Katz gives us a sense early in the story of what Lopez is up against:

The animal control agencies of L.A., including those of the city, the county, and two dozen smaller municipalities, put to death 104,841 animals last year, more than any other metropolitan area in the United States. About 35,000 of them were dogs, 55,000 were cats, and the rest a miscellany of rabbits, roosters, snakes, and guinea pigs. That is the good news. For decades the number has been so outlandish—250,000 a year in the 1970s, 150,000 a year in the ’80s, 125,000 in the ’90s—that even a decline this monumental somehow feels hollow. In 35 years Los Angeles has exterminated more than 5 million animals. The toll is at once appalling and abstract. “I call it every community’s dirty little secret,” says Ed Boks, the new chief of the city’s animal shelters.

It is a heartbreaking story - long, yet gripping and ultimately full of despair. I almost stopped reading it, for the same reason I almost couldn't watch the documentary Death on a Factory Farm. It upset me. It shook me up. It left me sad and hopeless. But you know what? That's a good thing. Because it is only by being shaken up in such a fashion that we come to terms with the tragedy of what is happening around us and then maybe - just maybe - we find the courage within ourselves to do what little we can (and believe me, it ain't much) to change the system for the better.

Please, please read this story. I can't say you'll be "glad" you did. But you will be enlightened and you'll have a better grasp of what, exactly, is at stake. There is a lot of work to be done. The animals are worth it, though.