Review: We Need To Eat!

Title: We Need to Eat!: A Guide to Conscious Cheap Eating

Author: Stacy

Genre: Sustainability/Cookbooks

Trigger Warnings: Moralizing about food

Back Cover:

An amazing guide to consciously cheap eating for yourself and others. This zine contains over 75 low-cost quick all-vegan recipes! You also get a bunch of vegan and freegan tips and advice, info on food and radical activism, gardening, finding free food, and giving food away.

Review:

This is a zine, I’ve never read a zine before, so I wasn’t completely sure what to expect. I got it because of the recipes – I’m not specifically vegan, but I’m interested in trying more vegan food, and recipes that are cheap are always worth looking at in my book.

I get the idea that this is pretty typical for zines, but there is a lot more than recipes in here. There are inteviews with people about things like cooperative economics and the group Food Not Bombs, there’s advice about getting food for cheap, a section on gardening to grow your own food, and also some politics in the beginning (the author says she is an anarchist right off the bat). I skimmed most of the interviews – I was reading the book for recipes, not information on economics.

The recipes, from what I could tell without actually making them, seemed good. Most of them were very simple (a very common theme was “rice/pasta/beans + a can of tomatoes + spices”), but I’m okay with that. Sometimes simple is good. And this was the first vegan cookbook to make nutritional yeast seem not intimidating to me. Some of these recipes I’m not going to bother with (I hate cooked cabbage so I won’t try any of the cabbage-based recipes), but some of them are definitely going in my to-try pile.

My only real problem with this book (zine? I don’t know if it qualifies as a book) is the moralizing about food. It only has one mention of the “meat is unhealthy and morally wrong” angle that a lot of vegan things do, which I’m glad of, but it does fall into the “anything in a package is inherently bad” argument. I am trying to eat more vegetables, but that is a personal decision about my own consumption, and I don’t believe in assigning moral value to any kind of food, regardless of how “nutritious” or not it is.

There’s definitely some worthwhile stuff in here, especially if you need to eat on a budget, and I’m absolutely going to try some of the recipes. I was a little thrown off by the zine format, but that’s more due to my inexperience with zines than any issue with We Need to Eat itself. A solid read if you want some easy vegan recipes or need to feed yourself on a really tight budget.