I had the best experience yesterday – I actually met some real life vegans. I’ve joined some groups on meetup.com, and a couple of them are vegan social groups. Yesterday one group met at the Sticky Fingers Bakery in Washington DC.

Sticky Fingers is known for their cupcakes – they actually won Cupcake Wars. The real Cupcake Wars, not vegan Cupcake Wars.

But they also have a little restaurant and everything they have on their menus is vegan. I’ve never been to a restaurant that offered me so many choices, but unfortunately the majority of their dishes contain fake meat. I don’t like fake meat – mostly tempeh, which I don’t care for. They also had veggie hot dogs, veggie chicken nuggets and veggie steak. I’m not sure what these things are, but I didn’t eat processed food before I became a vegan, and I didn’t become a vegan so that I could eat more processed food.

I ordered the “tuna” melt, which contained “tuna” salad made from chickpeas, which is how I make it, and some vegan cheese and tomatoes, all grilled and crispy. It was really good.

For dessert I had the red velvet cupcake – the frosting was comparable to non-vegan cupcake frosting, but I thought the cake was a bit rubbery. I’m surprised that this cupcake won the competition (actually it wasn’t the red velvet cupcake that won), but maybe I just got a rubbery batch. I’m not complaining, it tasted amazing, just the texture was a little off.

The best part of the afternoon was meeting all of the people in the vegan group. What a great bunch of people! One woman had a baby, so the age range was 15 months to 60? 70? Who knows, I can never tell peoples ages. There were men and women, students, professionals, artists, moms and dads. They all subscribe to different degrees of veganism/vegetarianism, from the extreme to the less structured. Some have been vegan for 20 years, some just started a few months ago. One thing I heard multiple times is that it is difficult to go to friends or family events and not have anything to eat, so some vegans eat non-vegan items. This is definitely a problem for vegans, the conflict between personal values and social graces, as we do tend to be nice people.

Vegans seem to have some other things in common I think. Deep thinkers, compassionate, liberal, environmentally aware, nature loving, funny and friendly. One guy was actually born in the same hospital as I was – Perth Amboy General in New Jersey – one year after me.

His parents and grandparents lived in Perth Amboy and so did mine. Perth Amboy is not like a megalopolis or anything, so this is impressive. I can’t wait to tell my mother.

It was just a great afternoon, it’s nice to spend time with people who have similar interests as I do. I can’t wait to do this again soon.