The following post was originally published by Amy Cook on The Veg Cooking Blog. Click here to view the original post.

Remember the days when going out to eat pizza with friends meant that, as a vegan, you were staring at a wall while everyone else chowed down on slice after slice of pies loaded with cheese and meats? Luckily for vegans, those times have passed. It’s now easier than ever to find vegan pizza options in almost any city. It’s so easy, in fact, that I’ve put together a list of the Top 10 Vegan-Friendly Pizzerias in the U.S., and the winners are …

1. Pizza Luce: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Pizza Luce in Minneapolis carries a plethora of pizza options. With its wide array of vegan mock meats—including mock duck and two different kinds of mock chicken—as well as two types of soy cheese and all your favorite veggies, you can put together almost any pizza your brain can imagine. Not in the mood for pizza? Grab one of the several vegan entrées, such as Mock Chicken Parmigiana or the Mock Muffuletta.

2. Pizza Pi: Seattle, Washington
Pizza Pi in Seattle doesn’t just have vegan options—its entire menu is vegan! Not only is the pizza tasty, there’s loads of variety. Mock meats range from pepperoni to Canadian bacon to veggie sausage, and veggies include sundried tomatoes, artichokes, and capers, to name just a few. Pizza Pi also carries vegan calzones, a wide range of sandwiches, and vegan desserts.

3. Gianna’s: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
A favorite when in the City of Brotherly Love, Gianna’s has enough options to make any vegan happy. From its wide range of mock meats (sausage, beef, bacon, ham, chicken, and pepperoni) to its interesting list of veggies (broccoli rabe, anyone?), Gianna’s has it all. And it gets extra credit for having vegan sandwich options, including a vegan Philly cheesesteak.

4. T.J. Scallywaggle’s: Allston (Boston), Massachusetts
T.J. Scallywaggle’s has an all-vegan menu that is even fun to read. With lots of specialty pizzas named in honor of “Captain Jazelda,” in addition to your standard fare, T.J. Scallywaggle’s is sure to bring out the pirate in you. It also has a bunch of tasty subs, calzones, salads, entrées, and desserts—all vegan!

5. The Pizza Research Institute: Eugene, Oregon
Don’t be fooled by the name! This restaurant is much hipper than the words “research institute” imply. However, with all the one-of-a-kind pizzas on the menu, you would think that there really was a staff of food scientists in the kitchen. One standout is the 3P—pears, potato, and pineapple.

6. Slice of Life: Sebastopol, California
Slice of Life in Sebastopol (near San Francisco) is a fully vegetarian, and mostly vegan, restaurant with a huge menu. It includes not only pizza—such as the Cheeseless Wonder—but also other Italian options, as well as Mexican and traditional American dishes too.

7. Mac’s Pizza Pub: Cincinnati, Ohio
Mac’s Pizza Pub is a lively college hangout in Cincinnati. When winding down after an exam (or skipping class!), locals enjoy Mac’s vegan pizza, which is topped with fresh veggies and gourmet vegan mozzarella. But veggie students aren’t limited to just pizza at Mac’s—the pub also offers a Boca burger.

8. Bella Pizzeria: Norfolk, Virginia
The hometown pizza favorite of PETA, Bella’s makes a delicious pie, piling plenty of soy cheese on top of a tasty New York-style crust and, if you like, topping it off with classic veggies. In the mood for something a little different? Try the white pizza, which skips the tomato sauce and uses an olive oil-garlic blend as the base under loads of soy cheese.

9. Pizza Fusion Franchise
With 23 locations across the country, Pizza Fusion is definitely the biggest vegan-friendly pizzeria. As a company that prides itself on being “green,” Pizza Fusion’s got the right idea by giving the option to get vegan cheese on any pizza, because the best thing we can do for the environment is to go veg!

10. The Rudyard Kipling: Louisville, Kentucky
The official pizza place of frontline warriors against Kentucky Fried Cruelty in Louisville is The Rudyard Kipling. The restaurant offers a super-duper healthy crust with more grains than you can shake a breadstick at. Word has it that you can even get polenta on your pies. Also, be sure to check out its famous Vegan Rudyard Burger.

Did I overlook an awesome pizza joint in your neck of the woods? If so, tell us about it!

Scribbles4Squirts / cc

Does your child dread going back to school? After months of playing with the dog or cat, swimming, and tabling at fairs and festivals, sitting in math class probably doesn’t sound like much fun. Perhaps you can help “ease the pain” by encouraging him or her to look at it as an opportunity to teach other kids about animal rights issues. That will make any blossoming activist eager to get back to class.

Here are six easy ways that students can help animals. Show them to your child or tween and urge him or her to come up with other ideas—after math class, of course!

1. Decorate your locker and folders with free animal rights stickers from PETA—that way you’re spreading the message every time you’re at school or in class. You can even order PETAKids stencils to design a T-shirt or backpack.

2. Homework isn’t all bad. If you have to write an essay or give an oral report, why not incorporate animal rights issues, such as animal testing, spaying and neutering, or vegetarianism, into the assignment? Your classmates—and your teacher—can learn a lot from you.

3. Set up a donation jar in class (with the teacher’s permission) and encourage other students to put their change from lunch in the jar. When it’s full, give the money to a local animal shelter with a nice note signed by all the students.

4. Ask your teacher if your class can do one of the activities in the Share the World humane education program.

5. If your school carnival or fair has contests that give away goldfish as prizes, get a group of caring students together and politely complain to the principal. Explain that a frightened, lonely goldfish is no prize, and suggest stuffed animals as prizes instead.

6. Say “No!” to mystery meat. For lunch, pack a sandwich made with vegetarian deli slices from Yves or Tofurky slices. Fake meats are sold in most grocery stores now. When friends ask what you have for lunch, tell them proudly.

For “extra credit,” ask the school lunch server to offer more vegetarian meals. Circulate a petition to show that other students want healthy, humane fare. PETA’s youth division, peta2, has a pack of resources to help you out. You may want to ask your mom or dad to help out too.

For more ideas, activities, success stories, quizzes, facts, and jokes, check out 50 Awesome Ways Kids Can Help Animals.

It’s time to go back to school, and that means back-to-school shopping. If for you this usually means spending long hours browsing racks for yourself or your kids between some extended visits to sit in the massage chairs—all the while only managing to find a couple of pairs of nylons and some lotion—fear not! There is still hope!

Luckily, hip and humane retailer American Apparel is here to save the day by giving away a $100 gift certificate to get you or your family outfitted for stylish study sessions.

In addition to saving the day, American Apparel saves animals. American Apparel shuns all fur, leather, and wool in its designs, and it is also an environmentally responsible business. American Apparel has even introduced an organic cotton line, which results in a pesticide-, herbicide-, and chemical-free product.

To enter, all you have to do is fill out the form below by September 5. If you are a winner, we will notify you by September 10.

By filling out this form, you are agreeing to the following terms and conditions. Your privacy is very important to us. Read more about PETA’s privacy policy.

greenclub / cc

My husband just found a crab scuttling around our garage. A very, VERY dusty crab (hey, whose garage is perfect?), whom he carefully carried outside. We’ve had dust bunnies before, but a dust crab? That’s coastal living for you.

It reminded me of two other critter-meets-garage incidents that took a little more effort to resolve. We discovered that a possum had taken up residence after opening the door from the kitchen to reveal two shining eyes. We had unwisely stacked a pile of cordwood in the far end of the garage (dumb, we know), and it seemed to be where he was headquartered. He had made it through a hole leading from the crawl space that was normally blocked by a brick but had become dislodged. We borrowed a live trap from work (one benefit of working at PETA) and caught the cutie in one evening. The breeding season for many north american mammals is from January to July. Should you discover a family of raccoons, possums, squirrels or other animals nesting in or around your home, in order to avoid separating the young from their parents, the animals should not be removed until the breeding season has ended. We let this guy out right outside the garage and watched him disappear into the night shadows.

A few years later, a rat surprised me by emerging suddenly from a cardboard box on an upper shelf while I was getting a jar of pasta sauce. We have nothing against rats—they’re smart, clean, and resourceful—but I didn’t want to find one in the laundry basket either. We ordered a squirrel-size live trap and baited it with peanut butter and other snacks. You can get live traps from the Tomahawk company. Sure enough, within a few evenings of supervised trapping (checking frequently so as not to starve or dehydrate the poor guy), we caught him. We released him in a park, stopped putting out so much birdseed for the waterfowl (a story for another day), and sealed up any holes we could find. But not all the holes apparently—as a certain crab could tell you.

garyscottthompson / cc

In these last few weeks of summer—in case you’re planning to slap an “I Heart My Mutt” sticker on the family truckster and load up Rover for one last summer romp—the following are some tips to help keep life happy on the holiday road:

Plan ahead. Before pulling out of the driveway, make sure that you consider the trip from Rover’s perspective too. Does he get motion sick? Will he be in a hotel all day while you’re hanging out on the beach? If you decide that Rover would be more comfortable at home, be sure to find a reputable sitter who will keep him happy and safe until you are together again.

Go through our detailed checklist to help make sure that you’ve got everything covered, from bottled water to a first-aid kit for your pooch.

Find ‘pet-friendly’ lodging. Check out our guide to animal-friendly hotels before you go. Knowing which major hotel chains will accommodate your needs will make things run more smoothly than driving up to hotels in the middle of the night with your fingers crossed to ask about their companion animal policy.

Pack a picnic for Rover too with a little help from Mr. Pugsly and Mr. Barky.

Bring along a CD that will make Rover happy and potentially inspire a sing-a-long.

Read more of our tips before hitting the road, and have a safe and fun trip!

kaboodle / cc

Back-to-school styles have to include the latest, trendiest shoes for fall. This year, MooShoes.com is teaming up with PETA to offer 10 percent off your entire online purchase. With such a huge selection of beautiful all-vegan styles—from dress boots to sneakers to strappy sandals—to choose from, you’ll be able to show your friends that compassion is the only fashion!

Visit MooShoes.com now and start shopping. Enter the code “veganstyle” at checkout. Hurry, because this coupon expires September 30!

ecx.images / cc

The first book I bought when the pregnancy test revealed two lines instead of one wasn’t What to Expect When You’re Expecting (aka “What they never told you about pregnancy that you wish you’d known before you got yourself into this state”). It was a small tome called Happy Kids, Happy Dogs.

Giehl and I share our home and lives with two wonderful dogs and two very cat-like cats (who are far too busy and important to be photographed today). Clyde and Emma are both around 3 years old, and they’re full of enthusiasm for life (and food). While kids and dogs are often a great combination (I loved the dog we had growing up more than I loved most of my friends and family, I think), too often, the dogs in the house get the short end of the stick after the baby arrives—and bad things can happen as a result (e.g., neglected dog starts acting out, neglected dog then becomes neglected and yelled-at-a-lot dog, then neglected and yelled-at dog gets dumped at the local animal shelter). Happy Kids, Happy Dogs talks about how to ensure that your human baby and your canine child grow up to love and respect each other, starting in pregnancy and all the way through adolescence.

So just as you’d prepare an older sibling for the arrival of a baby brother or sister, Giehl and I started to prepare our dogs early on for the arrival of a baby boy. We bought a doll and started carrying it around in our Ergo carrier, sitting on the couch with it pretending to feed, putting it in the swing … things that will become part of our routine when the real baby arrives. The trick is to make sure that the experiences the dogs have with the fake baby are positive (e.g., while I’m sitting on the couch feeding the fake baby, I’m also giving Clyde and Emma little bits of treats while they sit or lie quietly next to me). We also spent a lot of time working with them on some basic training. As Karen P., PETA’s resident dog expert, will tell you, dogs like to have a job! Our dogs’ only job is to sit nicely before they ask for something, but it makes a big difference in their overall mental health (and, therefore, in our sanity).

There’s just too much good stuff in Happy Kids, Happy Dogs to put in one post, so look for more later. And once B-Day (that’s Birth-Day) comes and goes, I’ll be sure to let you know how it all plays out in real life!

RachaelQ / cc

There’s a reason why I don’t move very often, and that reason is … moving stinks! And I’m not talking in some metaphorical way, like I’ve been cranky and tired and sore for the last two weeks and thinking “this stinks!” No, I mean quite literally that moving stinks. People use bleach, window cleaners that are full of chemicals, “all-purpose” cleaners, and wood cleaners that smell like fake pine trees … blech! Usually when someone moves out of my apartment building, the whole place stinks like a chemical waste site for days.

This can’t be good for our health, the environment, and animals. Lots of household products use outdated, cruel, unnecessary, and inaccurate tests to determine the safety of their products. Sorry, but smearing chemicals into Peter Cottontail’s eyes during a Draize test to see what will happen is just plain wrong. Rabbits may endure blindness, bleeding scabs, and ulcers.

But fear not! There are plenty of household cleaning products that are not tested on animals! You can check out a full list here.

I just used method products to clean my apartment. They have wood cleaners, glass cleaners, all-purpose cleaners, toilet bowl cleaners, and the “omop,” which Method brands as “nontoxic microfiber floor love for wood floors.” I mean, these people have everything you could ever want. And with scents like lemon ginger, cucumber melon, sweet water, almond, and ylang-ylang, your house will smell like a farmers’ market instead of a toxic dump. They are available at a fair price and are easy to find (lots of grocery stores carry them, as do most Target stores), and they destroy dirt like no other. And by not buying products that were tested on animals, you can sleep better at night knowing that rabbits’ eyes are safe and you and your neighbors aren’t choking on icky fumes and chemicals.

popgadget / cc

My boyfriend’s nonvegan brother and sister-in-law came over for his birthday last week, although Jay (the bf) wouldn’t let me acknowledge that it was for his birthday. “They’re just coming over for lunch, and we happen to be having cake for dessert,” he said. OK, whatever. I cried a little inside about not having birthday candles and moved on.

We both revel in treating nonvegans to delicious vegan food. So when Jay’s normally laid-back brother started looking a little breathless and said, “So, there really aren’t any eggs in this cake? It’s so moist,” we both smiled. I said, “No, of course not. You don’t need eggs to make a good cake,” and I grabbed my copy of The Joy of Vegan Baking to show them some recipes (everything in that cookbook is absolutely amazing).

Whenever Jay and I serve vegan food to nonvegans, he always repeats the same line like a mantra: “Nothing you’ve eaten today had any cholesterol!” It’s like we’re on an infomercial, and I try to stifle my laughter. The thing is that for Jay, it’s not really a laughing matter. His father passed away suddenly from a heart attack in his 50s, and Jay’s brother’s cholesterol and triglycerides are dangerously high. He’s not even 40 yet, and he’s on cholesterol-lowering drugs. Jay’s cholesterol, on the other hand, is 123. To put that in perspective, the average meat-eating American’s cholesterol is 210, while the average vegan’s cholesterol is 133.

When my stepfather had a serious heart attack last December, his doctor told him two things: 1) You’re very lucky to be alive (the type of heart attack he had is referred to as a “widow maker”), and 2) A vegan diet is the healthiest. While he hasn’t gone fully vegan, he’s significantly reduced his consumption of animal products and increased the amount of vegetarian foods he eats. When you consider that vegetarians live longer, have a significantly reduced risk of many chronic diseases (including heart disease), and don’t smell when they’re old, going vegan seems like a no-brainer to me—especially if you can still eat delicious cake.

teamsugar /cc

While I certainly enjoy the full spectrum of cruelty-free products, I appreciate the convenience and value that come from popping into my local 24-hour drugstore at 10 p.m. when I have run out of health and beauty items. Cruelty-free products are now easier to find than ever, and you don’t need to spend a fortune—after all, maybe you are saving up a bit to splurge on some Stella McCartney boots for the fall! These days, you can easily fill up your cart with shampoo, conditioner, body wash, bubble bath, laundry detergent, and lip gloss and still pay less than $10. The following are some of my favorite cruelty-free thrifty finds:

White Rain: Fabulous shampoos, conditioners, body washes, hair sprays, gels, and mousses—all for only $1 each.

Sun Laundry Care: Has a full line of detergents and softeners that typically cost anywhere from $1 to $3.

Mr. Bubble Bubble Bath: After all these years, they still makes the best bubbles no matter what your age is—and it’s very gentle on your skin. Regular-size bottles usually run about $2, and just like when many of us were kids, you can still save up proofs-of-purchase and send away for the cool T-shirt!

Wet n Wild Cosmetics: Luscious lip glosses, eye shadows, liners, and more. Generally priced in the $1 to $3 range. Markwins, the company that owns Wet n Wild, also owns the Black Radiance and Tropez cosmetic lines.

Jane Cosmetics: Lots of deep pigment eye shadows, lip colors, mascaras, and super conveniently designed packages of mineral make-up. Jane products start at around $3.

Palmer’s Skin Care: Rich cocoa butter and olive oil facial moisturizers, soaps, body lotions, and hair products—all affordably priced and starting around $2.

Search for more cruelty-free products here.

Happy budgeting!