Excellent advice. We've found over the years if we don't have high expectations, we won't be disappointed when the only thing the restaurant can come up with is a plain baked potato and a skimpy salad. And it means when a place -does- come through and do something amazing, it makes it extra special!

When I did some travel for business in the past, it became a little in-joke with my traveling companions when the waiter would come to the table to ask, "Does anyone here have any questions about the menu?" and they would all point at me and say, "She does!" I will forever be grateful to the team in Ireland who took us out to the one and only vegetarian restaurant in Cork at the time when they found out I was vegan. I would never have asked them to do that (or worse, demanded that they do so!), but the fact that they did it anyways meant the world to me.

I've always managed to find -something- to eat. Some of it was brilliant, some of it was not, but it was always edible.

It also helps to search out certain types of restaurants. We always know we can find something decent at Chinese (steamed veggies over plain rice, at a bare minimum) or Japanese (veggie sushi) restaurants, and we know our options will be much more limited at French or Italian restaurants.

I tell people I eat a vegan diet. If they press me about the leather shoes, as a "true" vegan would, I remind them I never professed to be a vegan, I just eat a vegan diet. I can get away with cheating (you and I must share that same sweet tooth!), my severely lactose and animal fat intolerant husband cannot. So if I'm the one sneaking a snack, I won't bother hunting down an ingredient list for that roll. If he's the one in dire need of a snack, we either go to the effort to hunt down an ingredient list or we excuse ourselves and go find something 'legal' for him. Or we starve and he gets cranky...

To Vegan Vagabond, whose response is "I don't drink, except for beer and wine" -- when my then 92 year old grandmother was asked by a doctor whether she drank, she reponded, "Oh no, I don't drink. I have a glass of beer every afternoon to keep me regular, and I have an occasional shot of whiskey for my cough, but I don't drink." She was dead serious. Cracks me up just thinking about it. The doctor thought she was just the cutest thing...

:-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)

I just checked NMPF website and I checked the source code of that e-mail page and when you click the send button the e-mail goes to some IT at david.paolicelli@vivakos.com . Why they are not sending it directly to the commissioner? Are they filtering and censuring the e-mails? Is that even legal?
Besides, why their list has only “Milk”, “Yogurt”, “Sour Cream”, “Ice Cream”, and “Cheese” but doesn't include butter? Isn't butter dairy product? Of course they know that if they include butter then even the non-vegan people will start laughing at them (imagine you can't say peanut butter anymore). This way they are deciding which veggie source products can have dairy product names like butter, and which ones can not.
Last but not least is the etymology of the word. Just because in English the word milk comes from act of milking a mammal that doesn't mean that it's the same for all languages. For example, in Armenian, the word for milk is "gat" and that comes from "gatil" which is a drop of liquid. So in Armenian you can call a soy milk a milk but in English not. Does it make sense?