Where Are All the Vegan Restaurants?

Madison Magazine, April 2019

In his 2000 memoir, “Kitchen Confidential,” the late chef Anthony Bourdain didn’t mince words when he described people dedicated to plant-based diets. “Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn,” Bourdain wrote.

Sitting in one of the Madison area’s only vegan and vegetarian restaurants — Surya Cafe, located inside Perennial Yoga in Fitchburg — chef Lauren Montelbano smiles in response to Bourdain’s quote. As a vegetarian since the age of 18 and a vegan the past five years, Montelbano understands the restaurant-world’s attitudes toward these dietary restrictions, but also mentions that a lot has changed since 2000. “It’s crazy how far we’ve come in 19 years,” she says. “Even in the last two to three years.”

The percentage of people who self-identify as vegans in the United States has risen from 1 to 6 percent in the past three years, according to a recent article in the New York Times. This increase is reported even as some see the switch to veganism — actively avoiding the use of animal products for food, clothing or any other purpose — as an extreme measure. The rate of vegetarianism has more or less stayed the same since the mid-1990s. While vegans and vegetarians still represent a small portion of the U.S. population, the biggest shift in recent years might be that people are eating less meat overall, as opposed to nixing it from their diets altogether.

There is mounting scientific evidence that eating animals has severe implications for the environment and the global economy. According to the United Nations, one-third of farmable land on earth is used to grow feed for livestock. The production of nonorganic feed (corn and other grains) requires huge amounts of fertilizer, fuel, pesticides, water and land. The process produces nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. Additionally, if all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, it could feed nearly 800 million, reports ecologist David Pimentel of Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.