Plants Plants Revolution goes to press!

The first 20 copies of PPR are sliding off the printer as we speak, and it looks fantastic. Both Brooke and I are super excited and proud to have our names on it.

We aren't giving away copies until after our workshop, which will be Saturday at 12:00 at the Vegan Macaroni and Cheese House (419 Shepard St, in Lansing) but here is a scan of the cover, illustrated by my very significant other. I will post the .pdf file of the zine after the workshop!

Improvisational cooking

Making up your recipe as you go along can be a scary idea to some people. However, cooking is not like other arts such as explosives manufacture, stereo assembly, or advanced computational geometry. It is a sensory art, and every time you cook (even from the same recipe) you are using your senses anew. Every tomato is different--the ripeness, the land of origin, all these things are variables that affect the character of the food. So, even if you are anal retentively precise about your recipe, things are still going to be different every time--so you might as well throw caution to the wind and put some stuff in a pot. (However, baking is a precise science and involves chemical reactions, so recipes are reccomended here.)

Cooking and baking from scratch are also mystifying to people who have never tried it, or even seen a bag of flour or a stockpot before. It is healthier and cheaper to use whole ingredients and not to rely on pre-made starter foods like veggie crumbles, canned sauces, and stuff-in-a-box. It is also tastier and more rewarding.

The industrial mass-production based food system was originally attractive to people because they were guaranteed the same sensory experience every time they bit into an Oreo or opened a box of Kraft Dinner. However, people have moved beyond that and now seek novelty with their food...which, in our current food system, results in an endless stream of new food "products" which are really just the same eight ingredients in different colored boxes. Fresh, fully-ripe whole foods are the original novel food, providing humans with stimulation and variety, as well as actual nutrients and a connection to the life of the plant.

We both started cooking from scratch by reading labels of our favorite prepared foods and trying to recreate them (a food hacker might call this reverse engineering which sounds way cooler than "reading the label on the soup can"). This is a good first step.

A second step is to find a combination of major elements that results in a satisfying dish--for example, a sauce with a protein in it, served over a grain, or lentil soup with random vegetables and a combination of herbs that seems tasty to you. (Brooke says: I have made medicinal soups this way--herbs like sage have healing properties, and the ever-popular garlic and onions have mild anti-viral properties as well as being ubiquitous seasoning bases. Franny made me say the word "ubiquitous".)

Other things you can do with the courage to cook without a safety net: tweak recipes to suit your tastes (as well as your allergies), combine more than one recipe for a dish from different sources to take advantage of the good qualities of both recipes, and veganize even the meatiest of loafs!

Franny's Food Story

I was born in 1984 in the suburbs of Detroit. I have been violently lactose intolerant since I was 13 (although for a while I invented a new radical political faction called anti-lactarianism...we believe that milk is murder...I think we were absorbed into veganism though). Later on in life I started having serious gastrointestinal distress and found out that I have irritable bowel syndrome and am sensitive to MSG and gluten (although my celiac disease test came back negative). I’m also allergic to mangoes.

I believe in the hacker ethic when it comes to food and cooking—this can be hard to explain and has freaked out acquaintances before as they seem to fear that a food hacker would be the kind of person to clone a cow, fill it with nanobots, and then serve it to them cold-seared with aspirin sauce. That is not my deal. I just believe in the radical idea that food should help people.

I was inspired by the work of Richard Stallman, the famous software freedom activist and hacker, to codify my beliefs about food:

The Four Freedoms of Food¹

Freedom 0: to eat the food or to not eat the food.

Freedom 1: to know the detailed origin of the food.

Freedom 2: to grow the food and distribute the food to help your neighbor.

Freedom 3: to cook the food and modify the food and recipe as you see fit, and to redistribute your recipes and methods to the public for the benefit of the community, as long as doing so doesn’t violate freedoms 0, 1, or 2.

Taking inspiration from the Free Software Movement, I believe in free food: free as in free speech, not necessarily as in free beer. In addition to the freedom to grow and eat food, I also believe that people should have freedom from food that they are allergic or sensitive to, or that they are ethically opposed to consuming. That is, your freedom to grow or eat food ends where you put undisclosed allergens in your manufactured food or fish genes into my supposedly vegan tomato.

¹These are based on the Four Freedoms of Code: 0—The freedom to run the code, for any purpose; 1—the freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs; 2—the freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor, and 3—the freedom to improve the program and release it to the public so that the whole community benefits. See Chapter 3, Free Software Definition, in the collected works of Richard M. Stallman, available online for free:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf