(From January 2016)

Grabbing lunch in Charleston is going to be a problem if you’re a vegan.

It’s not that you can’t find things to eat. You absolutely can, but while vegetarians don’t have much trouble navigating a fast food menu board, vegans are stuck with a lot of French fries, side salads, and bread –but even with that, you have to check.

For instance, Jimmy John’s in downtown Charleston is a great go-to for lunch. They deliver and do it really fast, but according to their corporate office, their bread isn’t vegan friendly.

Stick with the “unwich,” the chain’s lettuce wrap.

It’s not completely hopeless.

You can get the vegetarian burrito at Chipotle (minus the cheese and sour cream), Subway subs can be loaded up with veggies (skip the mayo and the cheese), and for a treat, try a Daquiri Ice at Baskin Robbins (maybe wait for the weather to warm up).

Still, even if you can find a place that has a vegan entrée, it’s still going to be prepared in the same kitchen, probably at the same prep table, and by the same hands that prepare the rest of the restaurant’s regular, meat heavy menu.

It’s something you think about when you’re not eating meat.

In Charleston, the most reliable place for a vegan to get a bite to eat seems to be Mission Savvy on Hale Street. Run by Jennifer Miller, for the last four years, the place has been a veritable island for people who’ve given up meat, eggs, and cheese.

The café serves a variety of vegan or vegetarian entrees, everything from sandwiches and little veggie bento boxes to totally meat-free tacos, all of which are vegan or vegetarian based on your dogma.

The Charleston native said, “I do use honey in a few things, which is kind of debated in vegan circles.”

Whether honey is vegan friendly or not has been debated for decades.

Hardliners, like PETA and the Vegan Society argue honey is clearly an animal product, which would make it off-limits. They also add that honey is just a sweetener, not a necessary nutrient, and there are plenty of other vegan sweeteners out there that don’t disturb the bees.

Others aren’t so firm and say honey, when properly harvested, doesn’t do any harm, and the bees have plenty.

This might be the “Winnie the Pooh” defense.

As for Miller, she hasn’t entirely made up her mind, though she says she’s been devoted to animal welfare and has been since she became a vegetarian 23 years ago.

“I grew up around good ol’ fashioned Polish stock,” she said. “We were not health conscious people. We ate lots of sausage, bratwurst, and processed meats.”

 But her parents were conscious that locally-raised food was probably better than the stuff they got at their local grocery store –at least, it was probably fresher.

“So, we tried to source all of our meat locally,” she said.

One day, her mother thought it would be good if the family visited the farm to see where they got their beef.

“That’s when it clicked for me,” Miller said.

The livestock on the farm didn’t seem all that much different than her dog, and like her dog, she thought, “These animals deserve shelter. They deserve to be take care of. They deserve to be loved.”

At 13, she didn’t know what that really meant.

“But I decided I wasn’t going to eat them.”

From there it was a long and torturous path toward education and nutrition.

Miller said she practically lived on breakfast cereal and instant mashed potatoes until about the time she got to college.

At Hiram College, she met her first group of vegetarians and vegans.

“And they terrified me,” she said.

They were militant, off-putting and not especially patient with newbies. She joined the college veggie co-op, but became frustrated and self-conscious with trying to prepare meals.

She quit and went back to eating in the college dining hall.

“I lived on French fries and spaghetti,” she said.

Over time, she educated herself as she earned her degree in Animal Behavior and Psychology.

After college, she worked at a couple of different zoos, including Zoo Atlanta, where she shared a house with some raw food enthusiasts.

“I thought they were crazy,” she said. “They were sprouting, juicing, blending and marinating. There was no microwave in the house.”

Miller wondered how they cooked, but the food they gave her tasted good and after eating with them for a few weeks, she felt healthier, a lot healthier.

At the same time Miller was settling into Atlanta and learning about nutrition and healing, her mother, Sally, was battling cancer for a third time.

Miller convinced her mom to come to Atlanta for a visit, where she, too, learned about raw food.

“It was just supposed to be a visit, but she ended up staying,” Miller said.

Her mom later became a raw foods expert, went on to school at the Raw Foods Institute, and credits her diet with being cancer free for 15 years.

Miller’s career shifted. She got involved with international animal rescue, which brought her back to West Virginia as a home base.

She said, “I was deployed all over the world to help with disasters. Mostly, I set up shelters in place for livestock.”

A lot of the animals Miller said she encountered, even small farm animals, had pre-existing conditions.

“There were signs of abuse and neglect,” she said.

She’d believed small farms were better than factory farms, but now she doubted there was a humane way to keep livestock. There was some kind of cruelty involved with all of it.

So, she decided the best way to save animals was to try and educate and serve alternatives to animal foods.

“My mom and I wanted this to be a place of healing,” she said.

That was the basic idea of Mission Savvy, to offer an alternative for people, like her, who wanted to eat compassionately.

What they found, Miller said, was that animal lovers weren’t the bulk of their customers.

“We had a lot of Dean Ornish people,” she said. “We had people in cancer treatment, people with diabetes, people who had just gotten some bad news –and wanted to know how to eat and get better.”

After four years, Miller said they have their regular customers and new people who show up, and while they’re the only café of their kind, she believes that could change as eating habits changes.

She believes it’s inevitable.

Sooner or later everyone will be eating less meat.

“We’re just one natural disaster, one epidemic, away from a radical shift in how we eat,” she said.

Consumers might not give up chicken to save the hens, but they might have to give it up if the next round of bird flu wipes out enough factory farms and sends the price per pound through the roof. They might give up beef or pork if the supply becomes unsafe.

From Miller’s point of view, it’s better to just go ahead and move away from animal consumption now, than wait and take chances.

“And we can build a more compassionate world,” she said.