Joti asks, "Are there apps that can help me find vegan food options or vegan restaurants?"
Great question Joti! There are a lot of great food-related apps out there for smart phones. Some are vegan-specific, but some are general purpose apps which have vegan and vegetarian options.
A great app (and site) to start with is Urban Spoon. We suggest you get it regardless of your cuisine preferences. It is a really polished app, and more importantly it's widely used so it has a lot of accurate, updated information, which is what you want in an app like this.
“Vegan” isn’t one of the options in Urban Spoon’s main search (“vegetarian” is, though), but once you find a restaurant that is tagged as “vegan”, just tap the word “vegan” in the app to get a listing of nearby restaurants that are vegan-friendly.
Another great general-purpose app is Yelp. If you have the Yelp app you can search for “vegan” from the main page, and it will pop up a list of restaurants. Actually, since Yelp isn’t just for restaurants, it will show you results like the nearby natural market as well.
As far as vegan-specific apps go, these is an app for both Android and iPhone called Happy Cow. It works a lot like Yelp, and the list it returned is pretty comprehensive and does include the local natural market.
There are also numerous vegan recipe apps – one example we found was I’m Hungry: Vegetarian Recipes. And if you can't find a vegan-specific store or restaurant and you're in a hurry, there’s an app called Secretly Vegan. Secretly Vegan lists common supermarket products that are vegan, so you can hit up your local convenience store confident that the stuff you’re grabbing off the shelves is vegan-approved.
On just the iPhone side of things, we found an app called VeganXpress, which works a lot like Secretly Vegan and tells you what vegan items you can find at fast-food chains and restaurants.
Other vegan iOS apps include Go Vegan with Sarah Kramer, which is a vegan recipe app with over 50 recipes. There's also Animal-Free, which allows you to scan the UPC code or type in the name of the brand of the food to determine if the contents of the food is animal or plant derived.
If you're thinking about going vegan, but you haven?t made the jump yet, check out 21-Day Vegan Kickstart by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which "gives you recipes and resources to improve and regain your health and includes step-by-step recipe photos."
So Joti, whether you're ready to go vegan or just looking for some nearby vegan cuisine, there definitely is an app for that.
For more great tech advice, visit Deemable.com.
