When I became a vegetarian, the first thing I realized was that it is ridiculously hard to do. If you live in a small town or if all your friends are carnivores, it is a struggle to find a lot of eating options.
The beauty of the iPhone is that it makes things such as being a vegetarian a lot easier . There are tons of apps to help you live your meat-free lifestyle. The only difficult part is deciding which ones are for you.
Eating out
When I first moved to Chicago, I spent quite a bit of time trying to find all the places that served herbivores. Now I know I could have saved a lot of time with VegOut, a $2.99 app that divides restaurants into vegan, strictly vegetarian and vegetarian friendly. This superb app has a friendly interface, and I wholeheartedly recommend you download it immediately.
VeganXpress is a similar app, but it focuses on fast food. For $1.99, this app tells you what you can eat at more than 100 restaurants. Although it is very basic, it is also incredibly handy. If only it could make the food at these establishments taste a little better.
For you traveling vegetarians there is Veggie Passport, an app that translates sentences such as ‘I am a vegetarian’ into foreign languages. The bummer with this one is that there are only a few sentences included, which is a bit disappointing for a $1.99 app. You would probably be better off with a full translator of some sort.
Dining in
There are plenty of apps for you vegetarian chefs as well. Vegetarian Recipes offers 200-plus recipes for the low price of 99 cents. I was pleased with the diverse selection, but this app is not very easy on the eyes. The cooking directions get bunched together and are difficult to read.
Vegetarian Blog Reader gives you easy access to the meat-free blogosphere, with vegetarian, vegan and cooking blogs, as well as links to vegetarian-related news items. The blogs are preloaded, but you can add your own and delete others. You are basically paying $1.99 for a list of blogs, but I can imagine this app being especially helpful to new vegetarians.
For those who want to grow their own food, there is Pocket Garden. This app guides you through the growing process with helpful information and pictures, as well as consistently updated content. Again, this will probably only be useful to newbies, but there the free version (the premium 99-cent version does not have ads) that is worth your time.
