For years, the PETA Files has been telling you how eating vegan is all the rage. But now, the clever folks at Google Labs have given us the tool to prove it. Their new Books Ngram Viewer allows visitors to see and compare, in graph form, trends in word usage over time, based on a database of books (here's a more thorough explanation of how it all works). And the food editor at Good has noticed that mentions of the word "tofu" have far surpassed those of "hot dog."

So if you know someone who still hasn't gone vegan, you now have graphic proof that all the cool kids are doing it! Then make sure they won't be left behind by sending them here.

Written by Jeff Mackey

Not sure how many of you will care, but I thought I’d share some cool geeky news that I’m pretty excited about.

Have you noticed how I’ve been hyperlinking the word vegetarian a bit lately? Well, our resident search guru Joel Bartlett has been at me to do it because it helps with "Search Engine Optimization." Or, in English, it helps Goveg.com rank higher in internet search engines.

Well, today, after months of super technical and top secret work behind the scenes, and after not nearly as much or nearly as technical and obviously not top secret work by me hyperlinking the word vegetarian, I’m happy to announce that GoVeg.com is now the highest ranking website on Google when you search for the word “vegetarian.”

As you also may have noticed, next on Internet-nerd Joel Bartlett’s agenda is getting his myspace profile to be the highest ranked page on Google when you search for Joel Bartlett. And he’s got some tough competition from an ABC weatherman by the same name who I will not link to for fear of increasing his search ranking . . .

All joking aside, we’re pretty psyched about this because we believe GoVeg.com is the best resource available for helping people go vegetarian, so we want it to be super easy for people to find the site. It really has taken a lot of work and many months to get there, so we’re pretty thrilled about it.