Dear Vegetarian and Vegan Reader,

Regrettably this site might have to close at the end of the year 2005 because of lack of outside support.

A year ago 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 a site about 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 appreciated the thousands of letters of appreciation that I have received concerning this site. 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 Earth Save 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 begin working on compiling this site about four years ago because when I traveled around 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 place 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 now in the process of doing much more research on animal products that may be found in apparent vegetarian items such as yogurt, potato chips or cheese and further expand this site. All this takes time and your financial help would greatly enhance these efforts.

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 10 hours straight to do research on what many of the Name Brand products we eat actually contain.

If someone was kind enough to donate $1,000 I would do 100 hours of work to research this subject and I am quite sure I could find out a large amount of information to protect the vegetarian around the world.

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 ingredient contain animals products.

But 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.

We have also started a vegan, vegetarian and spiritual web site to sell items to the public called Natural Nirvana (http://www.naturalnirvana.com). For now all the profits from this site will go to maintaining our work on our vegetarian web site,so you can know that any profits from the items you purchase will go towards an excellent cause.

Regrettably if I do not receive any financial support to help maintain this site in the coming year from sincere souls such as you, I will have to cancel this site on January 1, 2006 or at least stop updating it. I am extremely sorry, but otherwise I just can't spare the time at this time in my life otherwise.

So please dig deep into your heart and give a donation to help maintain this site. Please Click Here to give a donation.

If you would like to send in a donation please make the check out to Spiritual Guides and send it to

Spiritual Guides
2006 NW 55th Ave Apt J2
Gainesville, FL 32653

Thanking you in advance for your kind help. If you would 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 $15 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 or suggestions will greatly help us make our site more valuable to the vegetarian community. We are just now applying for our non-profit status and when approved in 2005 all donations should be tax-exempt.

Our own Vegetarian, Vegan, Alternative & Spiritual Sales Shop