Celia Granata: Mama Tried: Traditional Italian Cooking for the screwed, crude, vegan and tattooed (Microcosm)

Traditional Italian food is much, much more vegan-friendly than mainstream cookery lets on – it holds simplicity and emphasis on fresh ingredients, and often without the focus on meat at the centre of the plate.

Mama Tried draws mostly from fresh ingredients, and leaves the reader to go and find local, seasonal fruit and veg. Cecilia rarely reaches for substitutes for animal products; with the exception of seitan stew with porcini mushroom, vegan goat’s cheese (using unsweetened vegan yoghurt), or tofu skewers. Throughout, Mama Tried strives for the simple and achievable – sweet and sour onions, “aphrodisiac” asparagus or the excellent tomato and olive bread rolls.

Cecilia badges herself as a vegan tattoo artist, who grew up cooking with her family in Italy.

With a librarian-like love of organising, categorising and menu-building, Cecilia presents exquisite ideas for dinner – try potato croquettes, Sicilian vegetable stew and fresh fruit tart, as well as exceptional stand-alones such as frittatas or chilli pepper truffles. Now based in California, Cecilia has oodles of ideas for burgers, which are countered by heaps of summer and winter salads. Sometimes Mama Tried verges on the bizarre (strawberry risotto anyone?), but often the sublime (tiramisu or “Not Nutella”!).

With a clear, fun, design from a tattoo artist’s hands Mama Tried sits equally on the kitchen bookshelf or coffee table. If I've a criticism of this excellent book, it's the absence of photography – a I'm sure food fans would much prefer to see the results of her labours.

 (available through www.turnaround-uk.com) 

Sue Coe – The Animals' Vegan Manifesto (OR Books)

Equal parts beautiful and disturbing, The Animal's Vegan Manifesto draws heavily from Orwell's Animal Farm in a tale of animal and human liberation over 115 intricate, painstaking woodcuts. Sue says she grew up next to a slaughterhouse in Liverpool, which informed her work and inspired her veganism. That her creative process is so scrupulous, but subject matter often so often distressing, makes this book a labour of much devotion from a committed animal rights activist. Each panel is carved from the wood of wild cherry in a cacophony of different voices, which reach a joyful conclusion. The Animals' Vegan Manifesto keeps drawing you back to revisit its sometimes outstanding beauty.

 

Vegan restaurants

Just in case you thought the bloom in vegan eateries was something new.... during Victorian times, there were veggy restaurants in all major cities. Factory workers in the East End of London would pop into a veggy cafe for lunch, and fashionable ladies would meet at fruitarian eateries. Here's something from The Victorian Vegan:

How not to subvert an art exhibition...

So I thought I'd be clever and sabotage John Hyatt's Rock Art exhibition at Home cinema last night, planting a copy of The Vegan's Guide to People Arguing with Vegans in an exhibit. John is vegan and would probably enjoy such an act of subversion...

The zine wasn't there long, and soon disappeared. Towards the end of the night, I asked a member of staff why they'd taken it down and told her “it's not a punk thing to do”.

She told me she'd taken The Vegan's Guide down to read herself, that she thought it was really funny and it had kept her going on a long shift. I was left feeling humbled and very flattered – she got a few free copies of Cubesville to take home too. But the charming vegan staff at Home didn't find the copy I sneaked inside one of the comics - The Vegan's Guide is (invisibly) on show for a few weeks more.

VegUtopia

The future's bright, the future's green!

The BBC's movie set in a vegan future, Carnage: Swallowing the Past (directed by Simon Amstell, and featuring Grime MC JME) adds to a rich history of vegan Utopias. Not least HG Wells's debut novel, The Time Machine.

Here's a piece I wrote about it in The Victorian Vegan:

The Victorian Vegan Time Machine

First published in 1895, the novella epitomises the Victorian age. Our hero explains time travel to a bemused audience through a mixture of scientific theory and spiritualism. He returns the following week to recount his experiences. The dishevelled Time Traveller describes a Utopian society in the year 802,701, populated by the peaceful, vegetarian people, the Eloi. “Fruit, bye the bye, was all their diet,” he says. “These people of the remote future were strict vegetarians... I found afterwards that horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, had followed the Ichthyosaurus into extinction.”

However, the Time Traveller discovers the Eloi are predated upon the subterranean Morlocks, who farm them like cattle. While he watches the Eloi at play, he muses on their unfortunate plight: “Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same.”

As much as The Time Machine can be read as a novel about science, social class, or as a ripping adventure story, it is also a vegan text; a fruitarian Utopia in which the Victorian Time Traveller falls in love with the Eloi, his revulsion of the ethics of meat farming and his plain hatred of its perpetrators, the Morlocks. The Time Traveller craves meat on his return to Victorian London, which in turn highlights the savage within Victorian society – one which history and evolution would eventually tame.

One person's Utopia is another Dystopia?

Veganzines are now available through bigcartel

Get your Vegan's Guide and Victorian Vegan alongside the latest issues of anarcho-absurdist punkzine One Way Ticket to Cubesville on Bigcartel now!!!