Political Cooking: Wam Kat

Ok, this is going to be a German-centered book since the guy I'm talking about is Dutch and now lives in Germany, plus his book has only been published in German so far.

I hadn't heard of Wam Kat before I read an article about his new book "24 Rezepte zur kulinarischen Weltverbesserung" ("24 recipes to make the world a better place", dang German long words that can't be translated!) on Utopia.de.
A political vegetarian cookbook with a twist of biography in it? Sounded like my kind of book, but 25 € seemed a bit overpriced for it.

So I started reading about Wam Kat, who has been cooking for the masses for free at eco/environmental/AR gigs since the 70s, founded his own environmental network and was one of the first bloggers ever (Wikipedia says much more).

I also read some interviews and watched this video:


That convinced me to get the book... usually I wait until I've tried a bunch of recipes or have at least read a book from page to page, but I felt an urgent need to write about this book.

I'm not easy to surprise when it comes to cookbooks, and even though there's only 24 recipes in there (really? it feels like so many more!), I'm eager to try every single one of them. They are really inventive, and if not, have a lovely personal touch to them, and even though the book is called vegetarian 95% of the recipes are vegan. Where not, Wam suggests vegan alternatives- and I mean, for a change, real alternatives, not "leave out xy if you're vegan".

Plus, there's so much general info about the idea of Volksküche, left politics and just random chatter that's so much fun to read.

I'm going to test some recipes soon- and if you think your German is acceptable, give the book a try (after all, it's not the author's native language, either).

Did I mention Wam has the cutest Dutch accent ever?