The most brilliant ideas are the ones that when you hear about them, you immediately think, “Why didn’t I think of that?!?” That’s exactly what I felt when I heard about Planteaters, a new free iPhone app from David and Tracy Hersh. The idea behind Planteaters is that, when people go out to eat, they are planning on eating a meal, not an entire menu. Since more and more non-veg restaurants are starting to offer one, or maybe two, veg selections, we need to have an easy way to find those meals when we are hungry.
Thus, Planteaters allows you to search by location and identifies spots on a map where you can get a good meal, regardless of whether it’s in a vegan restaurant or is the only veg selection at the local steakhouse. Once you click on one of the map icons, it tells you the restaurant and the menu offering.
For the moment, coverage is restricted to major metropolitan areas, such as Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. But this should change quickly, once the app becomes more popular, since its content will be constantly expanded by its users, who can add and rate meals and share their opinions. Hopefully this user database will work hard at keeping the information up to date, since menu items change regularly. Though, come to think of it, menu items don’t change as often if they are popular, so, with any luck, restaurants that are currently featuring one vegan option will be encouraged, by the increased orders, to keep the item on the menu. Maybe they’ll also expand their options.
The only drawback to the app, as far as I’m concerned, is that it is designed for both vegans and vegetarians, and there is no way to limit your search to just vegan meals. Thus, once you have searched by location, you must click on the icon on the map, which leads you to the name of the restaurant, and then click on the restaurant, which tells you the meal or meals available at that restaurant, and, at that point, also tells you whether they are vegan or vegetarian. So vegans are always two clicks away from the information that really matters to them. This is somewhat annoying now, and will no doubt become even more of a problem when the app becomes more densely populated and one will have to click on numerous vegetarian meals (which really aren’t all that hard to find, anyway) to get to the ethically edible ones.
Hopefully, that glitch can be rectified in the future. Even given that failing, this is an enormously helpful tool to add to the other apps that help you find food, such as every vegan’s go-to app, VegOut (we couldn’t have survived our drive across the country without it). This should be able to help you out whether you’re traveling or just looking for what’s up around the corner. I myself found this heretofore unknown meal, the Vegan Bushman’s Plate, featuring jerked seitan, cous cous, veggies and calla loo, at the über-hip Miss Lily’s, one block from where we live!
Photo source: eatlikealadynyc.com