I'm on a mission to rank every vegetarian option in America.

I spent years staring at drive-through menus, wondering if the beans were cooked in lard or if the fast-food flavoring I didn't quite catch was animal-derived. I just wanted to know what I could eat.

It started in a Taco Bell parking lot in 2008. I was hungry, tired, and frantically googling "is taco bell sour cream vegetarian" on a 3G connection. The top result was a 2,000-word essay about someone's vegetarian trip to Tuscany.

That was the breaking point. For millions of us, eating out isn't a culinary adventure — it's a logistics problem. Which chain has real options? Is this ingredient actually vegetarian? Which frozen aisle find is worth it and which is a waste of money? These aren't lifestyle questions. They're practical ones, and nobody was answering them directly.

So I started. Restaurant by restaurant. Aisle by aisle. Ingredient by ingredient. That's still what this site does.