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?

Vegans against world hunger

"Every child who dies of hunger in today's world has been murdered."

(Jean Ziegler)

Yesterday was the first demonstration against world hunger in Cologne, organised by a couple of local AR groups as well as attac.

What for?

• producing one unit of meat require an average of 8 units of plant based food (mainly grains and soy)
• that means 35 % of the world's total grain crop is used to feed cattle
• meanwhile, 840 million humans world wide do not have access to enough food... we're not talking about "I could eat something" hungry, but about being nowhere near to meeting the required 1000 calories a day that keeps the metabolism going
• every minute, 11 children world wide die because of malnutrition

The problem is not that there's not enough food for all of us. The problem is what it is used for and major corporations speculating and making money with the poverty of others.
If the crops used to feed cattle would be used to feed humans, we could easily nourish double of today's world population.

I'd better not even start talking about the waste of water and other natural ressources.
Even if you're 150% cold hearted about animals and animal rights- can you ignore those facts when it comes to humans, dear omni reader?

There were about 150 people at the demo which was really well-mannered and quiet for an AR thing from my experience, but there's a bigger one planned in Nuremberg on 13 September.

That living a cruelty-free life that respects both humans and animals is possible was shown by the ever popular nearly vegan restaurant/takeaway Sattgruen from Düsseldorf as well by a bake sale.

soy tomato stew with rice and loads of parsley:

apple-something cake, another non-definable one and strawberry cream goodness!