Today, as reported by Eat This, Not That!, PETA bestowed its Top Grocer Award on the grocery store chain ALDI for its wide variety of signature-brand vegan food offerings. Its bountiful vegan options range from veggie burgers, hot dogs, meatless meatballs, vegetable pot stickers, and eggplant ravioli to an array of dairy-free cheeses, healthy plant-based milks, and even vegan ice cream.
“ALDI recognizes that consumers today care about animal welfare, their own health, and the impact that a meat- and dairy-heavy diet has on the environment—and it deserves to be recognized for offering shoppers a host of tasty vegan foods,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “These are times when consumers are contemplating numerous changes in their lives, and many of them, especially young people, do not want their money to support slaughterhouses and factory farms.”
PETA (whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”) notes that each person who goes vegan reduces their own risk of suffering from heart disease, cancer, strokes, and many other health issues—and saves the lives of nearly 200 animals every year. In today’s non-vegan food industries, piglets’ tails are clipped without painkillers, chickens’ throats are cut while they’re still conscious, cows are forcibly separated from their beloved calves, and fish are cut open while they’re still alive.
In addition, confining and killing animals for food has been linked to SARS, swine flu, bird flu, and COVID-19—and a new strain of swine flu with “pandemic potential” is spreading from pigs to humans in China.
Feeling hungry? For years, PETA has been pressuring restaurant chains to meet the ever-increasing demand for vegan fare—and they’re stepping up their game, big time. There are so many new mouthwatering vegan options popping up on menus every day that it can be hard to decide where to eat first. Not to worry—we’ve got you covered with this list of the latest and greatest offerings from chain restaurants across the country. Every vegan meal you order spares sensitive, intelligent animals and shows businesses that kindness belongs on every menu. Bon appétit!
Burgers ‘Beyond’ Delicious
Beyond Meat has achieved global popularity above and beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, as restaurants across the country are scrambling to offer its tasty vegan meats to customers. Denny’s expanded its offering of the Beyond Burger, making it available at more than 1,700 locations. Order it without cheese and All-American sauce to make it vegan.
Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. are serving Beyond Sausage breakfast burritos and Beyond Burgers for lunch and dinner. To make the burger vegan, hold the cheese and mayo and ask for a lettuce wrap at Hardee’s. Request no eggs and no cheese for the breakfast burrito. By choosing vegan meat and cheese, you’ll help spare gentle, nurturing cows who simply want to live in peace.
Don’t you dare forget Dunkin’s vegan options! Its Beyond Sausage Sandwich is available at more than 9,000 of its restaurants (hold the egg and cheese to make it vegan), and you can wash it down with a creamy dairy-free latte made with oat or almond milk. Compassionate customers can also enjoy a customizable Beyond Burger at all Bad Daddy’s locations, and at UNO Pizzeria, you can be a numero uno friend to animals by purchasing Beyond Burgers and pizzas with vegan cheese.
Plenty of chains offer other tasty veggie burgers, too. Mooyah now has a Dr. Praeger’s Black Bean burger patty, and White Castle serves vegan black bean sliders.
Pizza Pie Perfection
Blaze Pizza has vegan cheese and spicy vegan chorizo. MOD Pizza doesn’t charge per topping, so you can add all the veggies you want to your vegan cheese pie.
At Boston’s Pizza, you can order the Cheezburger Pizza on a cauliflower crust with Beyond Meat crumbles, topped with Daiya vegan mozzarella. Oath Pizza offers vegan cheese and Beyond Meatballs, and you can build your own vegan creation from scratch.
Two Boots has a huge variety of animal-friendly pizzas—with catchy names like V Is for Vegan and Earth Mother—and it offers vegan chicken, vegan sausage, and vegan cheese. Fired Pie—which has vegan cheese—recently added vegan chorizo to its menu.
Rumor has it that Sarpino’s Pizzeria has launched a vegan menu, featuring Beyond Meat Italian Sausage and Daiya Mozzarella, at many of its locations in Florida and Illinois.
Big-Hearted Burritos and Superb Salads
Need another reason to make every day Taco Tuesday? Beyond Meat is now on the menu at all Taco Del Mar and Taco Cabana locations, while Salsarita’s Fresh Mexican Grill offers BOCA Veggie Ground Crumbles and El Pollo Loco made its new chickenless pollo vegan.
fresh&co added Beyond Meat sausage to its breakfast menu. (Hold the egg and cheese to start the day the humane way.) It also offers vegan cheese as well as plenty of salads, soups, and desserts that feature only kind ingredients.
Just Salad now has Beyond Beef Meatballs at dozens of its locations and has removed cow’s flesh from its menu, stating concerns about its environmental footprint. The chain is even considering going completely meat-free within five years. Next time you drop in for a vegan meal, let the management know what a great idea that is for both animals and the planet!
Peaceful Pitas and Wonderful Wraps
You can find vegan meat at all 170 locations of Pita Pit. Enjoy flavorful Beyond Beef crumbles in a pita or salad. Pollo Tropical also offers Beyond Beef in its wraps, bowls, and other dishes. The Hummus & Pita Co. has added vegan shawarma to its menu, complementing its other compassionate offerings of falafel, vegan meatballs, and tasty salads.
Dairy-Free Desserts
Large chains are diversifying their dessert options and catering to customers who know that there’s no good reason to impregnate a cow forcibly and steal her beloved babies just so humans can eat ice cream. Dairy Queen launched a vegan Dilly Bar—made with smooth coconut cream—across the U.S. Baskin-Robbins has added a third vegan ice cream flavor to its lineup: Coffee Caramel Chunk—a bold blend of espresso, chocolate chunks, and velvety caramel—joining existing flavors Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough and Chocolate Extreme.
Want More Vegan Options at Chain Restaurants?
It’s never been easier to eat compassionately at restaurant chains, but a few are still dragging their feet on vegan options. Send some well-known chains a firm but friendly message that if they want to hold on to their customers—and gain some new ones—they need to start catering to compassion:
PETA, which owns stock in RH (formerly Restoration Hardware) had planned to grill shareholders over the company’s use of down pillows at the company’s annual meeting in Corte Madera on Wednesday, which is being held in person only despite—and in apparent violation of—the Marin County stay-at-home order and new restrictions on indoor office space in light of the county’s inclusion on the state’s new watchlist. But PETA’s request to present remotely was denied, prompting the group to alert authorities in Marin County on Monday. PETA’s full shareholder question is available here.
“RH is requiring shareholders to gather for a meeting during a pandemic, in apparent violation of Marin County’s stay-at-home order, making it impossible for PETA to participate,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA will not let RH stop us from exercising our right as shareholders to call on the company to switch to down-free pillows and stop profiting from gentle birds’ terrifying deaths.”
It is nearly impossible to track feathers back to their original supplier and determine how they were obtained, but video footage shows that in the down industry, workers often restrain birds and rip out their feathers by the fistful, sometimes leaving them with bloody, gaping wounds. Buying down can also support the foie gras industry, as producers frequently boost their profits by selling the feathers of birds who are force-fed until their livers become diseased and swell to up to 10 times their normal size. And all birds whose down goes into commercial goods are ultimately shipped to slaughterhouses, where many are still conscious when their throats are slit and they’re dunked into the scalding-hot water of defeathering tanks.
PETA first purchased stock in RH in 2013 in order to push the company to choose only animal-friendly materials. It agreed to stop selling mohair after a PETA video exposé revealed cruelty to goats in the mohair industry.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.
PETA has obtained recent U.S. Department of Agriculture reports revealing multiple recent violations of federal law at Alaska Interior Meats outside North Pole. In response, we sent a letter this morning calling on the U.S. attorney for the District of Alaska to review these violations of the Humane Methods of Livestock Slaughter Act and, as appropriate, file criminal charges against the facility and the workers responsible. As recently as this month, inspectors have witnessed workers shooting animals in the head three times before they were rendered unconscious, including a cow who remained standing and crying out after being shot and a pig who remained standing and swinging her head after she’d been shot. Another pig was shackled and hoisted into the air but came loose and crashed to the floor. Workers slashed the pig’s throat then shackled and lifted the animal again, only for him or her to come loose and fall to the floor a second time, after which the pig regained consciousness and sat up.
“These disturbing eyewitness reports show that these animals endured prolonged, agonizing deaths at Alaska Interior Meats,” says PETA Senior Vice President Daphna Nachminovitch. “PETA is calling for a federal investigation on behalf of the cow and pigs who suffered at this facility and urging all compassionate members of the public who are disturbed by this cruelty to go vegan and help prevent more animals from suffering in slaughterhouses.”
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. The group notes that pigs, cows, bulls, sheep, chickens, and other animals feel pain and fear and value their lives, just as humans do, and that the only way to help prevent them from suffering in slaughterhouses is not to eat them.
PETA’s letter to U.S. Attorney for the District of Alaska Bryan Schroder follows.
July 22, 2020
The Honorable Bryan Schroder
United States Attorney
District of Alaska
Dear Mr. Schroder,
I hope this letter finds you well. I would like to request that your office investigate and file appropriate criminal charges against Alaska Interior Meats and its workers responsible for repeated violations of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, which requires that animals be “rendered insensible to pain by a single blow … or other means that is rapid and effective, before being shackled, hoisted … or cut.”1 At the company’s slaughterhouse, located at 1561 Levee Way outside of North Pole, its staff repeatedly shot two animals in the head and allowed a third animal to regain consciousness after his or her throat was cut and he or she fell headfirst to the floor, as documented in the attached reports by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).
According to the reports, federal officials documented the following:
July 1, 2020: “[A] heifer was brought into the restrainer for stunning. Given that a .22 caliber firearm would be used, the CSI [Consumer Safety Inspector] moved to the outside of the doorway and stood there while they waited for Mr. Shannon Mobley, Establishment Co-Manager, to perform the stunning. The CSI heard the first stun attempt with a firearm. After the first stun attempt, the CSI heard the heifer vocalize. The vocalization consisted of a sustained, mooing sound at a moderate volume. Immediately after, the CSI heard a second stun attempt with the firearm after which the heifer vocalized again in a similar manner. The CSI looked into the kill floor from the doorway and was able to see the tail of the heifer moving up and down in a steady manner and determined that the animal was still standing. A third stun attempt with a firearm followed, at which point the heifer was rendered insensible. . . . The skull of the heifer was examined following the dressing procedures and three penetrating stun holes were identified. Two of the three stun holes were located outside the normal area where stun attempts are placed. They were located slightly above the eye level of the heifer’s skull.”2
April 21, 2020: “The SPHV [Supervisory Public Health Veterinarian] observed the stun operator apply a first stun attempt with a firearm. After the first stun attempt, the sow remained standing in the stun box. The sow actively walked forward a couple of steps and swung her head from side to side. … The stun operator immediately applied a second stun attempt with the same firearm. After the second stun attempt, the sow remained standing in the stun box. The sow continued to actively swing her head from side to side. … The SPHV continued to observe the body of the sow in the stun box through the plastic window on the door. … The third stun attempt was effective in rendering the sow insensible; the sow dropped in the stun box and did not actively move.”3
November 6, 2019: “The SPHV observed the stun operator … stun a market swine …. The swine’s rear leg was shackled. While the swine was being hoisted, the shackle loosened and fell off the animal’s leg, releasing the swine to the ground. While the swine was lying in lateral recumbency on the ground and still unconscious, the animal was stuck for bleeding. The swine’s rear leg was re-shackled and the swine was fully hoisted off the ground while unconscious. The SPHV observed, after a few seconds, the shackle loosen a second time and the swine fall to the ground, initially landing on … [his or her] head. The SPHV observed the animal regain consciousness. The SPHV observed the swine sit upright and maintain a sitting position with the back legs bent and the front legs straight with the hooves on the ground. … The stun operator applied a second attempt with the electrical stunning device to the head, which rendered the animal unconscious.”4
The Federal Meat Inspection Act classifies such offenses as misdemeanors and provides penalties of imprisonment of up to one year and/or a fine of up to $1,000.5 The fact that inhumane handling persists at the establishment makes it clear that FSIS enforcement actions alone are insufficient to deter future violations and that criminal prosecution is in the best interests of the animals killed there and the public. Given that the FSIS “fully supports the investigation of all those involved in alleged violations of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act” and that “[i]nvestigators from [its] enforcement division and from USDA’s Inspector General … stand ready to work”6 with offices such as yours, we respectfully ask that you investigate and bring appropriate criminal charges against those responsible for the above violations.
Please let us know what we might do to assist you. Thank you for your consideration and for the difficult work that you do.
Fierce pop icon Kesha launched her vegan beauty line with both “Animals” (her fans) and animals in mind. The Kesha Rose Beauty collection features high-quality makeup that’s completely cruelty-free (animal test–free and vegan). That means no sensitive rabbits, mice, or any other animals were harmed for these bold makeup looks. PETA’s Global Beauty Without Bunnies database has proudly welcomed the Kesha Rose brand.
The Kesha Rose collection was inspired by the singer’s own approach to life—“embracing who you are while standing fearlessly together to celebrate our differences.” With its celestial desert–themed packaging, the collection includes products to help you achieve dreamy, festival-inspired looks.
This stunning eyeshadow palette is the rock star of the collection. The 12 bold, metallic shades come in a gorgeous circular case with a burgundy tassel and a half-moon and cloud design.
Raising Hell red lipstick goes on matte and can be layered with the lip gloss in this set to add shine. The color was inspired by a lipstick that Kesha’s grandmother wore and was named after the singer’s latest single, “Raising Hell.” The Kesha lip gloss can also be worn on its own and features plumping ingredients and a formula that changes color depending on your pH levels.
For your perfect cat-eye look, this double-sided wand set comes in Cowboy Blues and Stay Gold shades. Kesha encourages creativity, suggesting that these can also be used on the lips or to draw temporary tattoos.
Companies and brands that ban tests on animals help prevent animals from being confined to cages and subjected to excruciating tests in labs. Always make sure the brands you’re supporting are truly cruelty-free by buying vegan products and searching our Global Beauty Without Bunnies database.
