I feel the same about "extra effort". When I lived in New York City, many vegetarian restaurants would go out of their way to get kosher and halal certified (by conservative clerics). The owners would prominantly display the certificate at the entrance, plus the menu would share the same information. In my view it was two things: (1) virtue signalling (fine by me), and (2) appeal to a more customers who might not "naturally" be vegetarian. I knew many Orthodox Jews at my office. If their favourite Jewish Kosher lunch/dinner place was closed, they would check for kosher veg options.
This is some of why it is important to distinguish moral food specifications from health-related specification: it takes work for me to eat out anywhere that isn't exclusively vegetarian because meat contamination makes me ill, and restaurants don't understand that, for example, labeling things "vegetarian" when they are fried in the same oil as meat is misleading. Sometimes the grill is well-cleaned and it is fine, and then other times I am in for a night of misery and it's just not worth the risk.
Does this sort of "status symbol" thing really matter to the average restaurant goer though?
I've never cared about it, with my only concern being if the place has something I'd be interested in eating and if it seems sanitary. Only reason I don't go to supercheap fast food places often is that their options for vegetarians tend to be pretty limited (particularly since I'm also not a big fan of vegan "meat", I want vegetarian food that's good through being vegetarian rather than despite it).
This reminds me of a thought I have had for a while regarding restaurant menus. I have the suspicion that the green "V" or whatever symbols used to show that a dish is vegetarian or vegan actually disincentives non-vegetarians from choosing the labelled dishes more or less subconsciously.
So, if I were to run a restaurant, I would try a different strategy. I wouldn't label which products are vegetarian on the standard menu. Instead, I would also offer a vegetarian version that only included the vegetarian dishes for whomever might want it. The standard menu would of course also include the vegetarian dishes, just not singled out.
My hypothesis is that, as a result, non-vegetarians would become more likely to order dishes that happen to be vegetarian but aren't explicitly labelled as such, rather than filtering them out of their options by default.
Yeah, that's the difference I don't think they really looked at. if the quality of the vegetarian food is better than the meat offerings, that would definitely help drive sales.
Restaurants have to have at least one veg option on the menu. This is mostly due to migration from different countries, not Vegans. By offering a veg meal you can serve a halal/kosher/"hindu" dish.
Are you absolutely certain this is the case? The majority of my vegetarian friends would be upset to find their vegetarian dish was contaminated with meat if they ate out in a restaurant. I don't see why it would be any different in BK?
The problem is that the selection of vegetarian options is usually quite crap for regular restaurants. I'm obviously not talking about veg/vegan or Indian places.
Generally irrespective of price, vegetarians only get 1 or 2 options. Most of the time even salads have meat on them. No, I'm not paying for salad+meat, hold the meat.
I use these veg labels to quickly scan what I can eat. For me they are useful. It's worth looking next time you're out. I doubt you can make a veggie only menu as it would look quite pathetic.
NOTE: I've lived in metro areas, Chicago, NYC, SF-Bay and Denver, so I'm not talking about the boonies.
I think the people who are concerned with this are familiar with how food is made at restaurants. For example, I worked at a pizza shop in high school and occasionally someone would request we wash our pizza cutter so that their veggie pizza would not be contaminated with meat from previous pizzas. We, of course, accommodated their request without issue. But I worked there for years and saw this request maybe 2-3 times. And that may have been the same customer. The people who take that level of constraint are a tiny, tiny fraction of the already smallish customer base seeking meatless/vegetarian food.
For me it's not about the vegetarian aspect per-se, but the lifestyle controlling aspect. Yes, I know it's on company time and dime - I don't care. There are dozens, or hundreds, of other companies that don't feel compelled to do this. I don't want to get preached to at a full-time job.
I think it's the same, but then again I'm not a vegetarian. What I'm really trying to imply is that what people decide they're allowed to eat is based on (mostly arbitrary) social norms. Is there anything morally different between being vegetarian and keeping kosher?
Aside: Anyone who figures out how to make salmon produce pork will have a license to print money (kosher pork!).
How about "Privacy is vegetarianism" instead? Just 20 years ago I'd have trouble going out for a meal in London because there was maybe one (one!) dedicated veggie restaurant in the whole city and lots of places didn't even offer an option on their menu.
Now, everywhere offers a vegetarian option, it's normal. What it took was dedication by fanatics* and to increase mindshare amongst the young. I'd venture that the same conditions would reap the same rewards with privacy.
I looked at this a couple of years ago - the big handicap for me is that it looks difficult to guarantee vegetarian food. From what I could find you had a good chance of getting away with it, but nobody who'd guarantee "yes, we will feed vegetarians".
My take from the article was that he actually cares about how people experience the food that he makes. Still, vegetarian cooking is hard. Doing justice to vegetables within a restaurant workflow is hard. Very few restaurants can pull it off. If he simply feels that he can't do it justice, he's probably right. Those things might be regarded as the province of home cooking.
I think the menu trend makes sense. "Vegetarian" has so many permutations that I think it'd be hard for a restaurant to mark a dish that way. "Vegan" has a much more well defined definition.
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