Part One: Going Vegan? Already One? There's an App for That!

First I will lay out the back story and the rules for this idea. To avoid making this post too long, I am splitting this experiment into several parts. I recently posted a blog entry about vegan Halloween candy and received many comments. A commenter mentioned that they would like to see a blog entry about the app that tells a person what is and isn't vegan. So I took the challenge and got on my iPhone.

I should warn anyone who hasn't already done this that just typing the word "vegan" into the search bar in the app store gets you 170 results. Many of the apps that come up after typing "vegan" are not even relevant to the subject, but isn't that true of many things you search for in the app store?

My rules were simple. I only looked at apps that seemed the most useful at a glance. I would gloss the description or base my decision solely off the title. I did not look at ratings or the number of stars an app received since I would be rating them myself. I went down the list until I got to a place where very few of the apps had anything to do with my intended goal.

Orcish Librarian was the first app that hinted I'd gone too far. As soon as I saw the title Animal Kill Counter, I quit looking.

Here are a couple of statistics and factoids that I found in my search:

• Ten of the first 25 apps are vegan/vegetarian recipe apps.
• Five of the first 25 apps are vegan/vegetarian restaurant finders.
• PETA has an app that pushes their ridiculous agenda right to your iPhone every day!
• There are three apps under the vegan search that run $9.99. The most I paid was $3.99 for Food Additives 2, one of the apps I was originally looking for.
• One of my favorite vegan cookbooks is for sale in its entirety for only $7.99.

My next installment will have my top rated apps and the final chapter of the trilogy will have the apps I found to be most useless or insulting to me as a vegan.