While donations are always appreciated, we need to raise awareness about how easy it is to eat humanely. Please spread the word to your friends, family, and coworkers and like or share our posts on Facebook and Twitter. We also need help from our users to add new listings, particularly humane restaurants.
The health benefits are very high for eating vegan and significant for eating vegetarian. Undoubtedly, most farmers that raise their animals humanely are also feeding them a better diet, not giving them an excess of of antibiotics, and so on. Humane farms are likely better for the environment in many ways - but the point of the Humane Eating Project is really to focus on eating in ways that cause less cruelty to animals. The rest of the benefits are a bonus!
Terms like free-range or grass-fed indicate some marginal benefit to farm animals, but do not equate to a commitment of treating an animal humanely. Many of these terms address only one issue of animal welfare and don’t take into consideration the myriad of cruelty that exists throughout the life of a factory farmed animal.  While Vegan is the only option that is completely cruelty-free, eating humanely-raised is a big improvement over eating factory farmed meat.
We plan to add grocery stores in the future. We feel that restaurants are more important right now for a variety of reasons. If you want to buy humanely-raised products at your grocery store, there are three third party certifications to look for: Global Animal Partnership (GAP), Certified Humane, and Animal Welfare Approved (AWA). GAP-certified products are available at Whole Foods. You can search the Certified Humane and AWA websites for where to find their products near you.
The humane aspects regarding seafood are complex and varied and there are no animal welfare certifications to verify wild or farmed practices. We plan to address seafood when we can do so in a way that provides high value to our users.
Short answer: At launch time we will have Vegan/Vegetarian restaurant listings globally but for Humane-Friendly and Watch-List restaurants we only have data for the USA. With the help of VegGuide.org, we have over 20,000 restaurants total in our database.
Long answer: We encourage users all around the world to use the app and add more Humane Friendly and Watch List restaurants to make the app more global oriented.
In the future, we will have to customize the Watch List feature country-by-country because these issues are unique to each country. We will also have to customize the educational aspects of the app (The Learn button) - again, to be more relevant to each country. In the more distant future, we’ll add support for other languages aside from English.
So as it is now, the app is geared towards users in the USA, but we hope that changes quickly.
Humane Eating is eating food that is vegan, vegetarian or humanely-raised.
If you are a Humane Eater you are concerned about how animals are treated in our factory farm food system. You are making a choice to stop creating demand for cruel food.
There are two ways to get included in the Humane Eating Project restaurant listing database.  First,  any restaurant that has a vegan or vegetarian menu can be added.  Second,  any restaurant that identifies one or more options on the menu as ‘Humanely Raised’ (or similar variations of the term Humane) can be added.  Other terms like free-range don’t qualify (see separate FAQ on “What about grass fed, free range etc?”)
We require that restaurants specifically use the term ‘Humanely Raised’ for two reasons:  1)  it helps spread awareness about the importance of humane eating and 2) it makes it very clear to our users why a restaurant is or isn’t confusing.  There are so many other terms out there it would otherwise be impossible to control quality otherwise.
In a future release, we plan to add a feature which shows which restaurants have verified that they are sourcing from third party humane-certified farms using certification organizations such as Certified Humane, Animal Welfare Approved, and Global Animal Partnership.
Yes, we want to encourage everyone to use this app. It will be free for restaurants to be listed as well. There will be benefits for users or restaurants that donate to the app, but donating is by no means required.
