I'll be completely honest, this last week has been incredibly tough. Between work and school, having time to prepare and cook vegan meals has been nearly impossible. I've been eating really random snacks as meals, and just having an overall rough time satisfied with what I was eating. So as any normal, 21 year old Communication major would do, I turned to the world wide web for some suggestions!
I originally googled "vegan fast food" in order to find quick meals to eat on the go. What I found however was SO MUCH BETTER! The first thing to come up when I googled "vegan fast food" as a list from greenplanet.org that had 20 meatless, and all vegan options at popular fast food restaurants. This list consisted of obvious things like french fries at Chick-Fil-A and Subway's Veggie delight sandwich, but also contained a lot of new and exciting information as well like TCBY's dairy free, almond milk-based frozen yogurt options. Not only is it super dope that TCBY is catering to their lactose free customers, but they are the first ever to create a dairy free option in chocolate!
I was so happy to see that bigger brands are literally creating products that are dairy free and providing so many vegan options and alternatives, but I was most shocked to see TACO BELL on the list.
TACO BELL??? VEGAN???
I knew taco bell had simple things like the bean burrito that you could make vegan by requesting no cheese, but i literally had no idea just how accommodating Taco Bell was to their vegan customers! From what I learned on greenplanet.org, at Taco Bell, you can order a lot of things "Fresco style" which means Taco bell will replace the dairy products and meat on the menu item with pico de gallo and guacamole! Upon further investigation, I found out that Taco Bell has a certified vegetarian menu that includes 26 vegan ingredient options! All of this was enough information to make me want Taco Bell imminently, however I was terrified that the employees would hate me for being so extra during the ordering process. So I went to YouTube to figure it out.
I searched "Vegan Taco Bell" and sorted the videos by most recent posts. There I found a vegan Youtuber "Chantymarie" who just two weeks ago ordered Vegan Taco Bell with her two friends! (Skip to 2:22 for immediate vegan content)
After hearing about how nice all the Taco Bell employees were about adjusting orders, and seeing how surprisingly normal all of Chanty's Taco Bell items looked, I decided to head over there after work.
The Big Day
After a long, grueling, nine hour day of watching 41 campers at a Nationals Game, I was so ready to chow down on some vegan Taco Bell. I whipped into the Taco Bell across the street from work, and pulled up to the intercom. Admittedly, I go to this Taco Bell too much, and drive a white convertible beetle, so I was greeted with my normal "welcome back" followed by seeing a large Baja Blast appear on the screen. I quickly added that I would like to order another item, and proceeded to order the same crunchwrap as Chanty did in her video. Ordering a crunchwrap Fresco style with black beans instead of meat and adding guacamole and potatoes seemed SO ANNOYING! But everyone was so sweet about it and my order appeared correct on the screen so I drove to the window.
While my crunchwrap did take almost 10 minutes to receive, it was SO WORTH IT! The crunchwrap came out literally steaming hot, so hot in fact I had to throw it onto my passenger seat to avoid getting burned! I drove home in a car smelling like a Mexican dream and my hunger grew. As soon as I got home I ripped into the crunchwrap to make sure there was nothing non vegan in there, and once I got the all clear I took my first bite. OH MY GAWD was this life changing. Why had I never put potatoes on Taco Bell items before???? Why is guacamole on every single menu item? While I didn't have answers to those questions, I did solve my own problem of having nothing close to work that catered
to my vegan needs. I can't wait to literally go back tomorrow! Thanks Taco Bell for being the best <3