Vegan/Vegetarian

When someone walks into a restaurant and sees something on the menu that says "Vegan" or "Vegetarian", they usually write it off as some disgusting concoction of rabbit food and tofu that they most certainly would not want to even try. I hate how misleading those two words are, there are so many different kinds of diets within even those two categories. People automatically assume that if something is vegan, you've ADDED something to it to make it vegan. When actually all you've done is taken OUT the animal products. I eat sandwiches all the time with no cheese and no meat, all veggies!

I used to work at the local pizza shop and they have one vegan pizza on the menu, meaning it does not have any cheese or meat on it. Working on the counter, I realized how much of an impact calling the pizza "vegan" had on it's sales. I watched guest's body language change from when they saw the pizza on the warming table next to me exclaiming "What pizza is that?! It looks delicious!" to "Oh, it's vegan. Never mind..." Wait a minute, you were stoked on that pizza until you heard me say that it was vegan, you like all the toppings on it, so why are you not ordering it? Because it's labeled "vegan". Interesting.... I did an experiment one day, instead of calling it "the vegan pizza", I called it "the tapanade pizza". Guess what? Sold the shit out of the pizza, people didn't even care there was no cheese on it, they still loved it!

Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is don't let labels scare you. Just because something says it's "vegan" or "vegetarian" does not mean that it's gonna be something weird.