If there is one travel resource that many vegetarians and vegan travelers use and highly recommend, it would be HappyCow. It has been making it easier to find veg-friendly restaurants, cafes, and more whether at home or abroad. Vegtravelbuddies recently had the chance to interview founder and director Eric Brent. He not only shared a lot of insights about his travels. He also talked about how he got started in creating HappyCow which has now grown into a massive online community, that serves as a go-to source of information for vegetarian and vegan travelers worldwide.
Q: I bet there is an interesting story behind how HappyCow started. Would you mind telling us more about it?
I started HappyCow after traveling for many years and having a really difficult time finding food. I traveled 15 years straight after college and spent a lot of time in Asia and Europe during that time. Back then, there was no easy way to find a vegan restaurant. Basically, I would ask people. Or if there was a phone book, I'd look at it or try wandering around. There was no easy, efficient way to find food. While I was in Malaysia there was a time when I wandered half a day trying to find a place to eat. I ended up having sunstroke and nearly had to be hospitalized because I’ve waited so long. I was fairly picky and I really wanted to find good food. I wasn’t always willing to hack a menu. I’d rather find a place that’s all vegetarian and are all vegan.
After a couple of years, I ran into a woman who I’m still friends with. She runs a restaurant called May Kaidee in Bangkok, Thailand. She was just pushing a food cart around and I wanted to help people find her. So I helped her by making some flyers. Eventually, when the internet started I wanted to get her listed online. But I couldn’t find any place to list her. I’ve had it in my mind though to create some kind of place like a guide for people to find restaurants like hers.
Later on, I was living in India and had a lot of free time. I just decided that nobody else was doing it so I could try to do it. I had no idea how I was going to go about it. I didn’t have any kind of plan in place except I’m just going to create this directory which is going to be worldwide and have vegan and vegetarian restaurants on it. During that time I taught myself how to program HTML. Eventually, I figured out how to upload this to the internet and got HappyCow online. That was 18 years ago - December of 1999. After about a year of trying to maintain this kind of monstrous code that was all hardcoded HTML, I ran into a friend who knew how to program well. He helped me convert what I had to something more dynamic. Slowly, it became easier to maintain, a dynamic website. But it wasn’t until many years later that it really took off.
Q: How would you describe yourself and your site?
I’ve been vegan for 27 years. The reasons that I’m vegan are for compassion for animals and other living beings, for the environment, and for my health. For those three reasons, HappyCow’s a really big part of my life. I’m dedicated to it because of the cause above anything else. HappyCow is from a vegan perspective. It’s about compassion. It’s not meant to be preachy or tell people how or what to eat. It’s just meant to be a resource to help people to find food. And every restaurant listed on HappyCow, every business, should be vegan-friendly. So we sometimes use the word veg options. But that refers to vegan options.
Q: What would you say is the no. 1 key to the success of HappyCow?
I’d say probably persistence. I never needed to rely on HappyCow as a source of income. I’ve always had other income that was I able to do it in my spare time. I had a lot of free time often most of the year while I was traveling for many years. So to really just being able to stay with it is one major thing. Also, another important part is there’s a lot of love in HappyCow. There are sacred numbers and spiritual mantras that have been put on the site. I think having a lineage from a spiritual path and bringing that into HappyCow has added another dimension that maybe can’t be quantified but it’s definitely present. And those reasons are also important factors.
Q: How do you manage your time traveling and running a popular website? What makes you passionate about vegan traveling? Tell us about your most memorable trip.
It’s difficult to name one that's most memorable. I love traveling. From when I was fourteen years old I’ve traveled alone to Europe. Ever since then I’ve been traveling a lot whenever I have a chance. HappyCow kind of allows me to have a reason to travel now.
There are certain parts of the world I just love and could come back to many times as well. When I’m traveling these days I have the chance to connect with people who are vegan and passionate about animal rights and veganism. It’s also been another great part of traveling. In the past, it was mostly about adventure or romance or exploring beaches. I’m super focused on finding the most beautiful places to live and beaches, tropical islands have been a priority. Nowadays it’s a little bit harder to take long trips because of responsibilities.
Some of the best places in the world, in my view, are very hard to get to. Even though the world’s a lot smaller these days than it was years ago because of easier access to the internet. But it is still difficult to find a balance to travel and work at the same time. Usually, I fall way behind and come back to LA and then have to catch up one year. But I still have fun.
Q: What is the biggest challenge and frustration for you as a vegan traveler? What is the biggest satisfaction you get from it?
Well, it’s quite hard in some places. I’d say airplanes and airports are often challenging. There are also large areas of the world that are not vegan-friendly really yet. For that reason, I’ve tended to avoid them. Parts of South America and Africa especially would be huge challenges as a vegan. I think with HappyCow in hand is like having a network now. It allows you to just hop off a plane and have internet access pretty much anywhere in the world. It’s so easy to travel and use HappyCow. I’m just grateful that I’m actually involved in it and being able to use it as well.
Most of the time I’m sitting in my office working. It’s only when I travel that I go to a vegan festival or even a vegan restaurant and meet people. When I hear the stories that people tell me about using HappyCow, how it saved their lives, I kind of get goosebumps and it feels really good. I’m not doing it for any kind of recognition or anything. But it’s nice to be validated and just see that there are real people who are using the site. I get tons of messages via email. But there’s something else to meeting someone in person. It's a pretty beautiful, rewarding feeling to meet people who use the site and are passionate about it.
Q: What can you say about what vegetarian and vegan travelers can look forward to in the future?
I think in general people are way more aware nowadays of what vegan means. Even if you are in a place with no vegan restaurants. You can walk into restaurants in many countries these days and tell the person that you are vegan and they’ll have some clue rather than looking at you weird. I think that awareness is continuing to grow.
There are certain organizations that are working to get every restaurant in the United States to have vegan options - every single restaurant. So because of that and because of all the products that are out – all the vegan cheeses and mock meats that are more readily available a lot of restaurants are having vegan options. If you’re a traveler, it’s just getting easier and easier.
I think we’re reaching some critical mass where in a few years from now it’s just so normal to have vegan options. Just getting that factor out of the way so that you don’t have to worry about what you’re going to eat when you’re traveling gives you so much more space to just see the place you’re going to and enjoy it on another level versus worrying about starving.
Q: In the over 50 countries you have been to, do you have any particular favorite?
I tend to go back to a couple of places. They continue to amaze me. One of them would be Warsaw, Poland. The city itself is interesting. I think it’s not a place you would go back to just for the city. It is easy to get a comfortable Airbnb for cheap there. The thing about it is there are now about 50 vegan restaurants within a mile and a half of each other. So that means you have 50 vegan restaurants you can walk to in 10 or 15 minutes if you’re living right in the center of the city. And that’s insane, it’s so cool! You can go to a Japanese restaurant one day and then go to macrobiotic organic or a burger joint for the next meal. They have like 24-hour vegan pizza delivery and a lot of community events going on. They have meet-ups, parties, and festivals. When the weather’s nice, you can definitely find me there. I’ve been back a few times already. And every few months the numbers are going up so fast in terms of how many restaurants they have. I haven’t been to half the restaurants as a result of all the new places that are opening.
London is also really amazing right now. There are I think 123 vegan restaurants and cafes in London. Of course, London is a much bigger city than Warsaw but it’s moving quite fast. I’m from Los Angeles. People tend to think of LA as being great to travel to as a vegan. There are good parts of LA. But the overall number of vegan restaurants haven’t been increasing like London or Warsaw or even Berlin.
Berlin is another city that’s very vegan-friendly. It’s so vegan-friendly that some restaurants actually have signs outside that say we don’t have vegan options here because every other place does.
Aside from that my favorite countries probably are mostly in Southeast Asia. Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore and Taiwan are some of my favorite places. Just recently I went to Vietnam. I can see myself living in any one of them. The food options, the culture, the pace people live their lives are for me somehow much nicer than living in LA.
Q: What would be your advice to vegetarian and vegan travelers?
Download the HappyCow app. We do charge for the full version of the app. It’s just a small one-time fee which goes towards the development of the app. It’s expensive to develop so you’re also supporting it. For me, it's so worth it in terms of making your life easier when you travel.
There are also other places for finding vegan restaurants like Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. But none of them are moderated content. HappyCow is 100% moderated by people - vegans who know what they’re doing and understand the difference between menus. A lot of times if you look on Yelp or another site you’ll find something that says its vegan. But when you actually go there you see it’s like a meat restaurant that has a couple of vegan options. The reviews and opinions on HappyCow would be from people who probably think more like you than a meat-eater. For that reason, that’s super useful.
There’s also a couple of other things that are useful when you’re traveling. One is to use Google Translate. The other is an app called the Vegan Passport. It's helpful when you can’t find a vegan restaurant. You can just quickly explain to the people what you want to order and what you don’t eat using it. I wish I had that back in the day. What I used to do in the days before the internet was write in the local language a bunch of sentences. I get someone to help me write it out – I don’t eat this, I don’t eat that. But somehow it wasn’t that effective. Sometimes it worked. But in China and other countries, it really didn’t help that much. People still wanted to give me some kind of other animal products. It makes it really clear, a useful tool when you’re traveling.
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Website: www.happycow.net
