VEGAN ON A SHOE STRING
By the People's Potato Project Collective

Interviewer: Claudette Vaughan

Vegan On A Shoe String is my all time favourite kind of vegan cookbook. It's run from out of a workers collective, they know what they are doing, they are providing an essential service to students and activists alike who financially need this service and the food is nutritious, hearty, substantial.

Most students aren't vegan but the People's Potato Project Collective itself urge students to try the food before judging it. Usually they get a lot of “usually I don't like vegan/ vegetarian food but this stuff is great. What is in it?”'

Now the cookbooks out ready to take people to the next level of cooking vegan food for themselves – and it's not without its sense of humour with recipes such as State Smashing Stews, Class war Coleslaw, Radical Carrot Ginger Soup and Sabotage Stock to name but a few. Yes, this is a political vegan cookbook.

The truth of the matter is Food is Political and there are some very good reasons why animal slave culture is not only inept, but it's plain wrong, nasty, brutish, savage.

Where did it all go wrong? Zev Tiefenbach in Vegan On A Shoe String says today almost every cafeteria in North America is run by a corporate food service provider. This means that in hundreds and thousands of hospitals, schools, universities, prisons, aged homes and offices across the continent the same packages are being torn open to produce the same greasy fatty nutritionally devoid food. This food is over packaged and over priced. Then of course, there is the perverse fixation on the fast food in our society.

The forces behind the institutions that are calling the shots have socially engineered themselves so that masses of people around the globe today still think of MacDonald's as a friend to us all.

Meat, the dead carcass of once living animals – how did the human species get it so wrong? The hamburger industry is responsible not only for the destruction of tropical rain forests in Latin America . In western Europe, Australia and all around the globe forests are dying on account of meat production.

Big food firms are integrating backwards, forwards and sideways. They are merging, diversifying, extending, concentrating and conglomerating. Food companies have moved into non-foods and non-food companies move into food. They have not only consumed the farming industry itself but they produce the cardboard boxes and bins to put their products in, produce their own TV ads, snap up the supermarket chains and devour the small competitors who never stood a change.

With all this kind of power it's inevitable that these companies have influenced the behaviour of all of us – partly because there has been no choice.

Radical changes are needed to feed both the human family and the non-human family.

Contrast that with this inoffensive Canadian vegan cookbook as both timely, relevant, pertinent and is all about change. The more self-sufficient and involved you become about food, the more aware of where that food is grown, the more you become part of the solution of not buying into the problem.

The People's Potato Project Collective shows you how to stock your vegan kitchen, different ways to cook, what depletes vitamin B12, there's a chapter on nutrition and of course there's the terrific recipes.

Mint Barley Soup, Quinoa and Mushroom Spinach Stir-Fry, Dancin Black Bean Salsa, Chocolate Zucchini Cake plus so much more.

Vegan On A Shoe String has a lot of important information in it on nutrition and cooking in general so people can really feel comfortable about what they are eating if they are thinking of either switching over to a vegan lifestyle or just if they want to try something new.

The book sells for $15.00 Canadian. Contact them at: peoplespotato@tao.ca