Veggies Catering Campaign started in October 1984, when two Nottingham animal rights activists decided to present the manager of a local McDonalds with a huge veggieburger ‘to represent an ethical alternative to the products of death and destruction sold there’ (see Pat’s history of Veggies in PN 2514, published for the 25th anniversary in 2009). Since then, the group has gone from strength to strength, including catering for Peace News Summer Camp from 2009 onwards. Since Pat’s recent retirement, Katy has taken over as Veggies organiser.
PN: It’s Veggie’s 40th birthday year, how are you celebrating?
Katy: We’re doing 40 events, and all summer there’s something happening. Glastonbury Festival was great. We have a new woodwork frontage built by Roscoe Blevins, and new artwork by Poppy – both new, independent, vegan businesses. We took 4,800 burger buns, and we didn’t bring any home.
We supported the Hidden Lands Festival, Sneinton Festival, and Reclaim the Power. There’s also Green Gathering, an off-grid festival where we’ll use our solar electric set-up. Then Northern Green Gathering, and Earth First! We’re doing loads of stuff!
And we’re always doing our mail-order burger mix, supplying homes and businesses.*
PN: Is it tricky, catering off-grid?
Katy: At Glastonbury it’s easy: we have a great team, and some people are very tech-minded. We have large-capacity batteries, a solar system, water pumps and a gas water-heater. At big and long events, it’s worth going to that effort.
Where we don’t have hot running water, we have a system with a series of soaking and rinsing boxes for washing up.
PN: What about at protest camps? Any challenges with the police?
Katy: The usual ‘there’s no stopping here, you can’t put your vehicle here.’ We were polite but also firm. They can’t deny people access to water. Last year, at Earth First! Summer Gathering in the Lake District, there were police and bailiffs around the edge of the site, but we were OK. We have had our equipment seized before, at marches in London, but that hasn’t happened for a while.
PN: Why did you pick feeding folx as your activism?
Katy: I love feeding people. You’re meeting such a basic human need, giving people sustenance to carry on doing what they’re doing in the name of all living beings on the earth. It’s not saving the world; it’s saving ourselves. The climate crisis might wipe us out, but the world will adapt with lots of casualties on the way. The world will still exist, it’s just we won’t.
PN: Do you find eating communally breeds fellowship?
Katy: Oh yeah! It creates community and brings people together. I love the food side of things. It feels like what we should be doing, eating communally and cooking in giant pots, working as a team, everybody having a role. And it’s free: good food should not be a privilege.
Veganism
PN: Has Veggies always been strictly vegan?
Katy: It has always been strictly vegan. Pat [the previous Veggies co-ordinator] told me two of the founding members were vegan. Pat was vegetarian at the time and thought the founders were hardcore. The initial aim of Veggies was to provide tasty quick food to vegans in Nottingham city centre because you couldn’t get much.
“Good food should not be a privilege”
It’s called ‘Veggies’ because they wanted people to know that it was vegetarian food at a glance, but they couldn’t call it ‘Vegans’ because nobody had heard of vegans in the ’80s! I’m so grateful to those people who put vegan food on the map and made it easier to be vegan today.
Veganism means our catering is accessible to everyone, and we’re not harming animals. We choose organic as it’s better for the soil and the environment. It would feel hypocritical if we got loads of cheap food with pesticides and potentially a supply chain with human rights abuses. That’s why we use Ethical Consumer – it’s good to think about where our food comes from.
I do think most people do want the best for other beings. It’s just ‘out of sight, out of mind’ with industrial farming.
I don’t think most of us could kill an animal.
We’ve got to imagine a better world, and the number of animals that we eat is not sustainable. Killing unnecessarily, when we have access to lots of other foods, is not acting with compassion or empathy. I believe eating a plant-based diet is the kindest and most sustainable thing to do.
PN: What would you say to people who ask: ‘isn’t it enough to go vegetarian?’
Katy: If animal cruelty is their motivation for vegetarianism, consider that there’s horrendous cruelty in the dairy industry.
We’re the only species that drinks milk from another species, which is just strange.
Eggs and milk take advantage of the female reproductive system, so it’s a feminist issue too. We’re relying on all these female animals to keep feeding us. Maybe a cow doesn’t want to be pregnant for years, and have its babies taken away. I think people don’t consider that the cow must be pregnant to produce milk.
So, if you are going vegetarian, that is a great first step. If you can, look into going vegan because it’s generally a kinder way to live.
PN: You’ve recently taken over as Veggies’ organiser, are you getting used to your new role?
Katy: I am, but I am encouraging everybody to organise: we all have ideas, and it’s great to give people the platform and the space to make their ideas happen.
Although I organise, we’re a workers’ co-operative. I would love to live in a world where everybody feels that they are able to make a better world happen. If other people organise alongside me, we can achieve more. If your idea aligns with the group, everybody should be able to trust themselves to do the thing.
It’s about undoing the conditioning that you must check with someone. You can do whatever you want, within anarchist principles.
PN: Any thoughts on the election?
Katy: I will say, I think I speak for the whole of Veggies on this one, although we are happy about moving away from the Tories and having politicians that might represent our views a bit better, ideally, we would like decentralisation of power.
We would love to live in a world of anarchist principles and communities running themselves for themselves, although we are a long way off that happening for the entire country.
But we are doing little pockets of it within our own reaches. At camps we all work to anarchist principles – nobody’s in charge or above one another and everybody needs to take responsibility for themselves. There’s no ‘them and us’, everybody is responsible for the community.
I don’t know how we’ll get there on a widespread basis, but just keep doing it, I guess, and hope more people vibe with it.
PN: Is there anything else that you would like to add?
Katy: I hope people can continue to support us and other independent vegan businesses. And if you can give money to environmental or animal rights activists, please do, because they’re skint!
