Vegan with a Vengeance

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Authors: Isa Moskowitz
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ready, puree in a blender or food processor along with the vegetable broth and sautéed onion, until smooth. Return the mixture to the pot and heat through, add the maple syrup and lime juice, and serve.

    PUNK POINTS
    My top-secret technique for prepping a butternut squash: First, peel the whole thing with a serrated peeler, if you have one-it does a good job of slicing off the hard skin. Cut the squash in half widthwise, separating the bulbous part from the long part. Place the bulbous part cut-side down and slice it in half, then use a tablespoon to remove the seeds and the stringy bits. You should then be able to cut the squash into smaller pieces. Next, slice the long part of the squash in half and then cut into whatever size pieces you need. All too often I watch people struggle with this gourd, trying to cut it in half in one fell swoop and then peel it. I hope this has cleared things up for those of you who don’t like cooking butternut squash because it’s too difficult (I’m talkin’ to you, Mom).

    Food Not Bombs
    Food Not Bombs is a loosely knit network of activists that get together on a regular basis to cook food and feed people. Groups exist all across the world. Much more than Meals on Wheels, it’s a social movement that has been growing since 1980.
    In the late ’80s and early ’90s, a group of us would get together on Sundays and go from store to store gathering food donations. In many cases, it was food that would otherwise have been discarded—blemished vegetables from the greengrocers or day-old bagels from the bagel shops. We’d haul everything over to Lucky 13—a squat on 13th Street that had been around forever and was cool enough to host punk shows and let strangers use their kitchen—in a shopping cart “donated” by the local Key Food. There we would concoct hearty vats of vegetarian soup over a few hot plates, using water we tapped from the fire hydrant down the block (I’m not kidding).
    When the soups were done, everything would be piled back into the shopping cart and rolled a few blocks to Tompkins Square Park. The crowd we fed was diverse: yippies, homeless, junkies, psychopaths, artists, squatters, punks, and some combinations of the above. This was during the time of the Tompkins Square Park riots; activists were fighting to keep a curfew off the park and a shantytown called Tent City was set up on the lawn as a home for dozens of people. It was a rather dystopian scene. Cops milled about, and it was anyone’s guess as to whether they would decide to arrest us on a given evening. Despite these drawbacks, conversation was always lively and the food was always appreciated.
    One of the greatest things about Food Not Bombs was that you could go to virtually any city and get involved. The experience was always different from place to place. In San Francisco I was shocked to see how organized they were. They had a van! They had folding tables and a banner! In Berkeley they cooked in a college dorm and served scones that were donated by a bakery. In Minneapolis they seemed to serve exclusively punks. In Baltimore they served in the inner cities and I bore witness to the sort of urban decay usually saved for postapocalyptic movies.
    If I had to name a time and place, I would say that cooking for FNB was where I gained my knife skills as I chopped scores and scores of vegetables. It also influenced my cooking for years to come. For a long time it was nearly impossible for me to cook normal portions of food.

    It is easy to start your own Food Not Bombs, or join an existing one, and feed people in your community. Check their Web site for more information: www.foodnotbombs.com .
    If distributed equally, the world produces enough food to feed everyone. There is an abundance of food. In fact, in this country, every day, in every city, far more edible food is discarded than is needed to feed those who do not have enough to eat.
    Consider this.

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