ANIMALS, ANARCHY AND ANOTHER DINNER IS POSSIBLE!
By Claudette Vaughan

More than just a vegan cookbook, Mike and Isy have put together a vegan guidebook featuring over 250 gorgeous recipes from cooking at the Anarchist Teapot Mobile Kitchen. Another Dinner is Possible features sections on growing your own veg; brewing your own beer; climate change; food production; wild foods and a wealth of other vegan goodies! We speak with Isy.

Abolitionist: Another Dinner is Possible is my type of vegan cookbook because even though veganism and its bounteous cuisine is coming of age around the world, many people around the world especially in the poorer countries such as Africa, Asia and Latin America are already vegan by necessity.  As the founder of veganism Donald Watson said, "Veganism meets all the criteria" and it can solve the world poverty and hunger crisis. If the world and political will were present surely the problems of the world regarding hunger would have been solved by now. What are your views?

Isy: The way we live in the Western world today is pretty bad all round – from the daily infringements on our freedoms to our created dependency on experts, consumer goods, and money, to how alienated we are from each other and from the natural world to how we exploit it, and how resource intensive and wasteful our lives are. Not to mention the imbalances of power and resource use on a global scale. Much of these dysfunctional things can be directly linked to what we in the Western world eat, and veganism, along with a move towards smaller scale and organic agriculture, more localised food production and less wastefulness are responses motivated by a desire to do things differently  - and better! A vegan diet usually has much less impact on resources and the environment than an animal product-based diet, especially in comparison to industrial animal agriculture that is highly inefficient and feeds sick and suffering animals masses of grains that we could be eating ourselves. However, to solve any of the major problems our world is facing today requires a complete re-organisation of our society, an end to capitalism and its continual accumulation, expansion and profit seeking, as well as a whole range of radical changes to the way we live. Veganism should play an important part in this.

Whether living unemployed in the heart of London, living in a poor region of Africa, in the slums of Calcutta or financially challenged in Hollywood veganism and your cookbook Another Dinner is Possible is affordable, nutritious and original.

Good food should not be a privilege but something we all should feel entitled to and fight for. I hate the idea that our Western consumer lifestyles are fuelling the destruction of the planet as well as the destruction of subsistence living in the majority world (i.e. growing food for themselves rather than monocultures for us) and that at the same time as selling this resource intensive lifestyle to the poor of the world as something to aspire to, the privileged few champion a 'return' to more local, organic and small scale agriculture. So, while sugary drinks are cheaper than proper fruit juice and crisps are still a mainstay in most kids' lunches, and undernourished on experts, consumer goods, and money, to how alienated we are from each other and from the natural world to how we exploit it, and how resource intensive and wasteful our lives are. Not to mention the imbalances of power and resource use on a global scale. Much of these things can be directly linked to what we in the Western world eat, and veganism, along with a move towards smaller scale and organic agriculture, more localised food production and less wastefulness are responses motivated by a desire to do things differently  - and better!

Political vegans are anarchists to the established order which is corrupt, racist, sexist and speciesist. Tell us your views.

People are vegan for many different reasons. Although it can be said of most vegans that they are willing to go against the stream by choosing an unconventional diet, not all place their veganism into a political context. To me though it's an obvious consequence of how I feel about the way the world is organised and the exploitation of humans, animals and the Earth our lives are based on.

Name some of the ways we need a kitchen revolution.

This is a topic I am always excited about. Everything from what we eat, our access to food and our relationship to food, as well as the way food production is organised globally and nationally presents a challenge to those of us who dream of a different world. On the one side you have individual's choices in their diets – veganism, home-cooked vs. ready meals, organic, fair trade, local, seasonal, less wasteful, avoiding supermarkets, eating healthy, growing your own. Then there are also the collective and community projects based around food, which can be consumer bulk buying food co-operatives, farmers markets, shared allotments and growing projects for example on disused urban sites, school food gardening programmes, seed saving, home production clubs and community initiatives, composting schemes, communal cooking and eating clubs and events, healthy eating courses, cookery clubs, community cafes, Food not Bombs (who collect food that businesses were going to throw out and cook and serve up vegan meals from it), community catering collectives, vegan campaigns and more!

Our efforts are linked to people all over the world who bear the brunt of the West's obsession with cheap food and corporate obsession with profit making. The struggles for autonomy and land in the majority world need our support, both directly and indirectly through reducing our demand for their exploitation.

They range from the land squatting MST in Brazil and the peasants organisation linked to them, Via Campesina who network around subsistence and land struggles, to Korean farmers who riot over farm subsidies to Indians who burn down genetically modified crops.

A Movement serious about taking on the big guns, confronting exploitation and destruction and building a new world with a fairer distribution of wealth globally should start with a plant-based diet because… tell us why?

... the way we eat dictates what we do on a global level; the animal industry and everything connected to it is a major factor in global exploitation of people, pollution and resource use as well as just being plain cruel.

With all the new and exciting vegan cookbooks out in the public domain – which is what we want – we should not in any way be embarrassed that our vegan standards such as classic and hearty lentil soup, veggie hot-pots, curries, shepherds pie, mashed potatoes and tofu are actually the way in which we as vegans are more than adequately addressing how the crisis of how frequently a child on Earth dies as a result of malnutrition and starvation - every 2-3 seconds – and that’s not counting the hundreds of thousands of people who die as a direct result of malnutrition and starvation this year alone not only in India and Africa but now including the displaced refugees in Syria and Jordan who have left Iraq, the Iraqis who chose to stay, as well as the poor living in the Bronx, USA and New Orleans. We are indeed one people. Your views please.

The imbalance of what is consumed in the West and the rest of the world is completely outrageous, with the West also impacting on and claiming most of the land in the rest of the world. Shipping grain out of areas where malnutrition is on a crisis level or cutting down rainforest to grow soya that is then fed to animals so that we can have meat on our plates at every meal is not an exception, it's part of how things are currently organised. World hunger as a crisis is by now finally often admitted to being a distribution issue, however it's also more than that, it's also majorly an issue of our dietary choices due to how resource intensive animal farming is, and how wasteful in terms of calories and land use. If this inequality is ever to be addressed properly it will involve many people in the West eating much less animal products and being less wasteful in general.

Talk about the monstrosities inflicted upon the animals; those who see us their friends and rescuers whom the human race is quick to betray.

The animal industry has achieved the complete degradation of animals to nothing more than commodities, rearing them in unimaginable conditions, making them ill, and slaughtering them by the thousands on a factory line to then be sawn up, packaged and sold at the cheapest prices.
Anyone who feels any bit of compassion towards animals can't condone what is done to them on such sheer scale today. However the market for organic meat, dairy and eggs, or free range eggs (which is often a huge crowded indoors barn, and involves killing male chicks and still pretty young yet less productive female chickens by the thousands) is also in the end a market, and is still treating animals as commodities.

I also find that people who claim to only eat free range eggs, organic meat, etc actually end up accepting a lot of battery farmed eggs or factory farm meat in the products they buy in their daily lives. I say go vegan to show your respect towards animals.
The general idea of domesticating animals, a process that started 11 000 years ago, doesn't sit well with me.

Another Dinner is Possible has some German vegan dishes such as Bratkartoffeln and a rosti side dish, Kartoffelpuffer as well as a whole chapter on vegan South Korean dishes i.e., Korean dumplings and Kimchi. Kimchi is big in Australia especially in sushi rolls. How did your recipes come about?

My parents are German and South Korean. German cooking is not the best for vegan dishes, although there are some notable exceptions such as Kartoffelpuffer which I completely adore with apple sauce; it's amazingly satisfying street stall food that gives you heartburn just from looking at it. Korean food is fantastic for vegans though. You may find that authentic Korean cooking will involve meat stock, or fish sauce or fish flavouring, however they're often not mandatory, and it's easy to replace or leave out. Also, dairy isn't really used much so most vegetarian dishes are vegan. Kimchi is the Korean national dish, it's a spicy fermented pickle that many health conscious people in the West have discovered for themselves too, and it's served as a side with every meal. You can buy it ready made in most Asian shops and I recommend trying it – eat it with rice, and maybe some miso soup. Sometimes you can't really 'import' cuisines from abroad to the UK because the staple ingredients are just not readily available or the same; but you can get most of what you would want for Korean cooking easily enough in Britain – in fact you can grow most of it here – so I think it's a great potential addition to English 'foreign' food!

The Anarchist Teapot is a kitchen based within the anarchist and ecological movements. It doesn't consider itself separate, some kind of service or vending machine. When the cooks are cooking away you are enjoying what you do. It's not a job with a manager as such, but it's self organised and on your own terms. Talk more about the great Teapot!

We are all volunteers in the Teapot, and we do it not to make money for a boss or for ourselves, or to 'cater' for people, but because we are happy to take on the role of preparing food for events, camps, conferences, demonstrations etc that we are involved in or that are part of the movements we are active in. This creates a completely different atmosphere in the kitchen; it's not a job (and face it, catering is often a pretty heavy duty job) but something we want to be doing. We divide up responsibilities amongst ourselves, give each other the space to go do other things, for example at a weekend gathering if some cooks want to go attend a workshop we try to make that possible, and also we enlist where possible the help of other random volunteers who are attending events we are at, to help chop or wash up or serve up.
Also, the Anarchist Teapot collective consists of friends; we choose to do this together and enjoy cooking with each other. And if we have a food fight instead of getting dinner ready on time, so be it.
Though we do pride ourselves on making tasty, good food and doing it well. We don't serve slop, even if it's cheap and to activists.

When hordes of people want to come together to discuss the state of the world, learn skills, share information, eat vegan food, talk about animal rights or take action they need good plant-based food to keep them strong and healthy so what role does love play in all of the above Isy?

We cook for people because we want to, not because we have to. Good vegan food is nourishment, taking care of ourselves and each other. And being conscious of what you eat and how you eat it, and cooking good vegan food, whether for yourself or for others, is a way of declaring your care for the world!