Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh
Vegan
Fig. 1. Stop signs from the same intersection in Presto, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I have no idea how this particular intersection became a target for vegan graffiti and its backlash. Photographs by author, January 31, 2024.
Vegans do exist in Pittsburgh. There are restaurants, listed both on Happy Cow and on a local site, Vegan Pittsburgh, where vegans can eat.
Nonetheless, I would describe Pittsburgh as vegan-hostile. There are endless places to eat—if you are an omnivore. But try to find, for example, a Starbucks that has the chain’s plant-based breakfast sandwich. Places that do have vegan options usually only have one or two vegan options.
I was stunned when I wandered into a place in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh that purported to have vegan options. Those options were salad.
Okay, as it happens, the place specializes in salad and the salad was very good and, actually, very filling. But my jaw has to have visibly dropped at the cliché that I had in so many years of being vegan (I’ve been vegan since May 5, 2008) managed never to actually confront. The sandwiches, alas, were only for omnivores.
Then there are the oddities: A restaurant in North Strabane run by a Jewish family whose patriarch gets his information and attitudes from the same sources as often anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. The bakery in Squirrel Hill that stops offering sandwiches two hours before closing. (The food at both of the former is, or at least was, excellent, by the way.) A restaurant in Allentown where the food is tasteless without onion (I’m hypersensitive to onions, peppers, and cilantro) but which local vegans nonetheless rave about. A restaurant in or near Bloomfield with such restrictive hours that I don’t even try to fit it into my schedule anymore.
Which doesn’t leave much.[1]
Dani Janae, “Pittsburgh vegan scene stumbles after losing multiple restaurants,” Pittsburgh City Paper, April 27, 2022, https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/pittsburgh-vegan-scene-stumbles-after-losing-multiple-restaurants/Content?oid=21556088
- [1]Dani Janae, “Pittsburgh vegan scene stumbles after losing multiple restaurants,” Pittsburgh City Paper, April 27, 2022, https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/pittsburgh-vegan-scene-stumbles-after-losing-multiple-restaurants/Content?oid=21556088↩