One of the many things we love about living in Los Angeles (now ten years!) is the incredible vegan food scene.

We knew about many of the amazing vegan establishments before moving here, yet I don’t think we had a grasp on how far-stretching the food scene was, and how we would just love being right in the middle of it.

We have had hundreds of vegan meals in a restaurant or at a food truck at vegan or vegan-friendly places..

I bring all of this up as last year in LA, owners of some of the more popular vegan restaurants here decided to serve meat. We were definitely disappointed. Their Pasadena location was one we frequented. We decided to stop going there, probably a whole other topic for a blog post.

We were in that area a couple of weeks ago and saw the building was empty, the restaurant had closed.

I have believed for a long time that if a person decides to become vegan for animal rights/animal cruelty issues, they will most likely always be vegan. I personally can never imagine not being vegan.

I don’t expect every vegan I know or hear of to always be vegan.

I digress. I call myself vegan. I’m not sure I am purely vegan, or a pure vegan. I suppose these terms mean different things to different people. I have not purposefully consumed animal products in almost 30 years.

What I keep coming back to while paying attention to this news are the vegan places I love that are vegan because of the animals, because of compassion. My very next thought is how many of them no longer exist, like One Veg World and Naughty Vegan Panda in Pasadena.

I also have a few places we have found in LA that are not entirely vegan but do have amazing vegan dishes. I will continue to go dine with them too. As some in the discussion of the recent news have pointed out, and I understand, restaurants like these have never purported to be vegan or having a food vision based on compassion or animal rights.

More to come on this.

Thanks for reading.