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Dear Vegetarian and Vegan Reader,

Regrettably this site might have to stop being updated regularly because of lack of outside support. At the present time we make regular updates daily and do a complete overhaul of the site yearly for a three week marathon.

I was asked how I had time to create and maintain such a detailed vegetarian restaurants and health for stores information site for the entire world by a person who helped maintain the excellent Toronto Vegetarian Society web site.

I took his comment to mean as difficult as it is to maintain one city, how hard it is to maintain the entire world. My answer was by plenty of time-consuming hard work and some how I just found the time.

I consider a site like this one to be invaluable to the vegetarian community and I highly appreciate the thousands of letters of appreciation that I have received concerning this site and donations by vegetarians and vegans who have a generous heart.

But regrettably the hard realities of life including financial responsibilities set in and I just have to face the realities of maintaining such a massive site.

I see some of the excellent animal protection and vegetarian organizations such as PETA, FARM or EarthSave doing a great job both protecting animals and promoting vegetarianism and I also see how they get great support from the vegetarian community. While my efforts to maintain a vegetarian site have met with almost no help from anyone.

I began working on compiling this site about six years ago because when I traveled around the USA and the world I found it very difficult to find information on vegan and vegetarian restaurants and health food stores. Basically I found it difficult and in some places almost impossible to find a decent vegetarian meal so I decided to compile an up-to-date guide myself.

Not only did I find the places listed on this site, but I also took on the extra time and expense of calling every single place to confirm that they did exist and to get even more information about them.

I am also doing and will continue to compile regular Vegetarian Alert Food, Cosmetic & Body Care Products Newsletter. I of course would like to do much more research on animal products that may be found in apparent vegetarian products found in supermarkets and health food stores. All this takes time and your financial help would greatly enhance these efforts.

I would think that many people don’t know that many of the ingredients in products we eat contain an ingredient listed on the label called “natural flavoring.” Regrettably in the US there are no requirements for companies to list whether these “natural flavorings” contain animal products. It is left to the responsibility of the individual companies if they so choose to state whether their added ingredients contain animals products.

I believe it would be worth-while to ask them directly and if they don’t want to answer directly it could be directly assumed that these natural flavorings are in truth animal derived.

Click Here to view Vegetarian Food, Cosmetics & Body Care Newsletter I, Newsletter II.

We are also in the process of compiling a detailed collection of vegetarian and vegan recipes compiled from famous vegetarian, vegan and raw food restaurants and from readers of this site. All this great work takes time.

We are starting a charity called the Vegetarian Research Organization, whose main purpose it to find out valuable information for vegetarians around the world.

If someone would be kind enough to donate just $100 for this important cause, I would be willing to drop what I was doing and spend 8 hours straight to do research on what many of the products we eat, drink and wear actually contain and make other further improvements and updates on this site.

If someone was kind enough to donate $1,000 I would do 80 hours of work to research this subject and thoroughly update this site.

Of course any donation would be greatly appreciated and would be extremely helpful in maintaining and expanding this site and in this way help make this site one of the most valuable vegetarian resources on the Internet.

So why this subject is still fresh on your mind please dig deep within your heart and Please Click Here to Donate to Help Maintain & Expand This Site

Thanking you in advance for your kind help. If you want to contact me about what is contained in this letter please feel free to email me at vrupdates@yahoo.com or call me a 352-372-2520.

Sincerely yours,
John Howley

PS: Please note that anyone in the USA or Canada who gives a donation of $20 or more will receive a free copy of our “USA Vegetarian Restaurants and Natural Food Stores” book signed with a thank you note from the author as an appreciation of your invaluable help.

If you have any suggestions on how we can improve or add to this vegetarian site please feel free to contact me. Your questions, additions or suggestions will greatly help us make our site more valuable to the vegetarian community.

Our own Vegetarian, Vegan, Alternative & Spiritual Sales Shop

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