The restaurant industry gets a little better each year at serving the needs of vegetarians and vegans. A decade ago, a meal in a typical restaurant might consist of a side salad with oil and vinegar, hold the cheese, egg and bacon bits, followed by a plain baked potato with salt and pepper. After some pressure from customers, restaurants have discovered hummus, artichoke dip and portobello mushrooms. Eventually, the National Restaurant Association issued an advisory to all its members urging them to veg up a little or start losing patrons. A recent poll suggests that one in six meals ordered in sit-down restaurants in the U.S. is vegetarian. So we have made a lot of progress.

Still, there are a quite a few places out there that still haven't caught up with the times yet, and could still stand a little urging. When we end up in one of these places, we have gotten in the habit of leaving one of these little cards with our payment. Generally we'll get a good response (you'd be surprised how many waitpeople identify themselves to us as vegetarians or vegans, even in not-so-veg-friendly establishments). For the last couple of years, we've been printing these up and giving them out to friends. Now we'd like you to get in on it.

You can download a sheet of these cards (10 cards to a sheet) in the form of an Adobe Acrobat file, which you can then print out, take to your local copy store, and have them print up and trim out a bunch of copies for you. Hand them out to your friends, leave them at restaurants. They are all eventually going to go veg anyway, but it certainly doesn't hurt to speed up the process.

Download a --k Adobe Acrobat file

Install Acrobat Reader (it's free)

if you can't make this work, let us know, and we'll send you a page of cards.