By Tine Roycroft

Vegetarians ~ does this scenario ring a bell?  You’re out with a group of omnivorous pals and there is a need to feed.  You follow the pack and end up in a restaurant where your friends are salivating over their meaty meal options and your vegetarian palate gets to decide between the garden salad and the bread that comes free with the meal.  Sadly, the definition of “garden salad” at this restaurant is defined as a whole lot of iceberg lettuce and a pathetic looking cherry tomato.

Well guess what, vegetarians and vegans no longer need to settle for table bread!  VegWorcester.com, brainchild of Drew Wilson, 23, is a wonderful resource for all things vegetarian.  The site contains information on restaurants, cafes and grocery stores where one can easily find all sorts of non-meat and even non-dairy goodies.  Wilson created the site to answer a question he kept getting: “How do you keep vegan in Worcester?  There’s nowhere to eat!”

“The site was started about 6 years ago now,” said Wilson.  He had started his own vegetarian lifestyle at 12, then ~ after being inspired by the book “Diet for a New America” ~ went vegan.

“It’s funny because Worcester actually has a very dynamic and diverse vegetarian community with a lot of great vegan restaurants,” he noted.  All of these cafes, coffee houses and places to dine can be found in VegWorcester’s 2009 Veg Dining Guide to Worcester.

VegWorcester.com is the online way to keep up-to-date with the group’s many events and outreach projects.  In addition to telling you the best places to buy sprouts or soy, VegWorcester does a great deal of community outreach effort to educate Worcester residents about vegetarianism.  They organize educational events around vegetarianism, veganism, animal rights, and the environmental impact of meat production.  The energetic members are constantly out in the community, providing a humane-education program to local schools, having monthly social meet-ups, conducting a writing group and a college outreach program, and distributing “veg starter kit literature” to would-be vegetarians.

The “starter kit” concept is a great tool for those embarking upon vegetarianism because it encourages diversity in one’s diet ~ no more boring and repetitive meal times that have you bemoaning soy’s existence.  The kit includes great recipes and pertinent information needed in order to maintain a healthy and happy lifestyle.

And the future is bright ~ or green? ~ for VegWorcester, according to Wilson.

“We’ve got some really cool things going on,” he says.  “One of the neatest projects we are working on is meeting with a lot of the local restaurants and encouraging them to provide vegan options and giving them the resources to do so.  We’ll point them in the right direction of distributors who have really awesome vegan cheese or other things that will help them.  I think this is making Worcester an even cooler place to live.”

For more information, go to VegWorcester.com.

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