Restaurant’s Transformation From Meat to Meat-Free Wins PETA Award

Vegan Venue Recognized for Putting Health on the Menu Over COVID-19 Worries

For Immediate Release:
August 26, 2020

Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382

A Vegan Business Award is on its way from PETA to Griselda Muñoz for closing one restaurant, and creating another, Vegan Avenue, which puts great taste and customers’ long-term health on the menu. Vegan Avenue’s standouts include vegan versions of the Philly Cheezesteak Sandwich, as well as Birria Quesadillas with seasoned jackfruit, and Mexican Hash tofu scramble.

“COVID-19 has forced restaurants to adapt in all kinds of ways, but Griselda Muñoz has made the smartest change of all by getting out of the scary old meat business and focusing instead on foods that come from plants!” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is recognizing this local eatery for announcing to the community that the future of dining is vegan.”

PETA notes that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed that 75% of pandemics come from animal sources, invariably from confining and killing animals for food. That close confinement on factory farms and in live-animal markets has been linked to SARS, swine flu, bird flu, and COVID-19, which is believed to have originated in a meat market—and a new strain of swine flu with “pandemic potential” has been spreading from pigs to humans in China. The meat industry has allowed slaughterhouse workers to face a nearly unchecked spread of the novel coronavirus—more than 40,000 cases of COVID-19 among workers have been recorded.

Vegan Avenue will receive a framed certificate.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.