Instalment of Two of I Know What You Ate Last Summer

Ta Da! More from London.

I was staying in a hotel with only a kettle, so I bought myself a bowl and spork and tried to enjoy my picnics on the floor. I got these things from the WholeFoods/Fresh'n'Wild in Soho.


My breakfasts - coffee and a Laura's muesli/tofu/strawberries pot - it was delish.



I loved this place - Ha Ha Veggie Bar in Camden Lock Market. Everything was vegan except the cheese, and it had some rocking vegan mayo. My friends Jess and Lachie ate too - we had felafels and burgers (with seedy handmade veggie pattie on a wholemeal roll) which were made when we ordered them by a lovely guy.

Ha Ha Veggie Bar: Camden Lock Market, Chalk Farm Road, Camden, London NW1.






From Planet Organic - a forgettable Laura's Sunball (sticky icky sweetness) and a really godawful sandwich - dry crumbly bread, dry beetroot, a swish of hummus and a real waste. Boo!


Some real junk (but good junk) ... RedVeg Burgers in Soho. Most things - burgers, fried, felafels, hot dogs - can be made vegan. The best thing about it is that it is a real fast-food style burger (if that's what you're after) - soft bun, textured dark brown pattie sans lentils or tofu, a bit o' lettuce, tangy mayo - but with coriander. The fried look like Macca's (good or bad - you decide!) and come in an open top cardboard cone.

Two things annoyed me about RedVeg. As the name implies, the shop is festooned with images of Che Guevara and Lenin, which I found a bit disturbing. I was uncomfortable with the conflation of veganism with controversial far-left figure, even if in a wry, trendy Soho way. It seemed like a) a blunt marketing tool, and b) a good way to continue the "veggie eating commie hippie" stereotype.

The second thing that got my goat was that the vegwursts and hotdogs were listed as vegetarian on the instore flyer, but vegan on the board above the counters. In a vegetarian shop this is not on.

You might note that the packaging changes from red to blue to red - ahh, EagleEyes, it is indeed form two different meals, carefully selected by your guide to demonstrate the wrapped, closed and open versions. The red versions had hickory sauce - sweet, smokey, real Down South ma'am.

RedVeg: 95 Dean Street, London, W1D 3TB.





Sheese from World Vegan Day. Meh. (Actually, the smoked cheddar was good enough for me to cart all the way home, so that was preemptive. The rest of it still didn't ring my bell though).

Instalment One: I Know What You Ate Last Summer

Having fallen shamefully behind with my overseas blogging, despite having faithfully recorded almost every mouthful I consumed, I now admit defeat and present a montage of New York and London eatering (is that jumping the shark?).

There are still a few proper reviews in the works, but to make sure that I didn't dutifully, publicly and sometimes a little embarassingly record and note every forkful and track down like a bloodhound all the eateries that I went to, here is the first instalment of an abridged, abbreviated and written-without-my-dear-notes series entitled "I Know What You Ate Last Summer".


This brand "Laura's Idea" was available in a number of supermarkets in London, including Planet Organic where I would plonk myself with my morning unsweetened-soy-latte and tofu-muesli pot. Not all of the products are vegan, but those that are are clearly labelled and you can tell that they're produced each day because the labels contain adorable and inconsistent typos. Bless!

VitaOrganic in Soho, London. My Bloody Mary -type juice took ages, but being entirely grumpy and cranky from the flight made me too grr-grr to complain very loudly. The selection of salads varied nicely and was served directly from pot to bowl.

A pita-pocket-sort-of thing from a deli on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. It was a bit like curried tofu and although soggy and falling apart, was surprisingly nice.

I was determined to try as many of the soy cheeses form WholeFoods as possible, blithely unaware that quite a lot of the soy cheeses contained casein, thus vastly reducing the number of vegan soy cheeses and really making me cross.



Tofurkey and Follow Your Heart soy cheese - chemicals on a plate.



That's all for Instalment One, folks. More slack writing and vague musings to follow.

On cheeriness and noticing the now, or: I try to think about the moment and not go racing ahead

Perhaps it's time to inject some cheeriness after the last two slightly sooky-la-la editions. As I write this (I type it after at the hotel; by "write" I mean actual real-life old-fashioned manual labour hand-writing) I am sitting in Neal's Yard, London, behind Neal Street but before Seven Dials, between Long Acre and Covent Garden on one side and Shaftesbury Avenue on the other. It is 11am on a Monday morning. I have just been served a soya (as they say) latte in a happy little yellow cup. I think it looks drinkable. The courtyard is full of young trees homed in brightly painted metal barrels, and each building has slightly wild looking window boxes at every window, some filled with wildflower combinations running and spilling over and down, and some with flourishing herbs. On the building to my left a blue circular historical plaque tells me that Monty Python, filmmaker, lived here (woz 'ere?) between 1976 and 1987. I assume that all members of the troupe, rather than the fictitious eponymous filmmaker, came here to work.

Although the weather is a slight grey chill and a breeze is hitting the back of my head and the gap between where my new Secret Society of Vegans hoodie doesn't quite meet my jeans, the day is bright and crisp. My coffee is a little watery but strong.

The windows are all painted different colours inside and out. I wonder if someone once saw a blank and dirty yard and overlaid their imagined paints and green life. I see dark green, purples of all kinds, forget-me-not blue, orange, maroon, navy, emerald, royal blue, lime, tangerine, dark fuchsia and electric blue. I see red and black and yellow and real fuchsias like ballerinas and real lavender and real geraniums and real forget-me-nots and other trees and flowers for whom I have no name. I see a bonsai. I am sitting next to cardboard boxes of golden delicious apples, lemons, bananas, oranges, pineapples, watermelons, limes, tomatoes, and some tropical melons that I'm ashamed to say I also don't know the names of. A helicopter flies low overhead. Ivy falls like long dreadlocks over the Monty Python building. Prayer flags hand over the top balcony and birds perch on an old metal goods hoist underneath a small bell and the sky.

I am in London. I love London. I feel comfortable and at home and happy. I am lucky. I will be pleased to go home and see my boys and sleep in my bed and eat my food. But I am here and I am practicing noticing the now. It feels good.

On cityscapes, or: I can't find what I need

It is only once removed from a familiar environment that your assumptions are exposed to the air. In particular when travelling it is those day-today things we look for without seeing and use without questioning that are suddenly absent, and we find ourselves helpless without our safety net of patterns and expectations.

Sometimes strange things appear too, disrupting our sense of what should go where and the proper grouping of things. In Europe it is the ubiquitous tabac, selling cigarettes, stamps, magazines, coffee, and all manner of other goods and sundries - but once you realise the range of bits and pieces they sell, and that there are three on every block, they get used regularly. There are also the services, the mammoth petrol/mini-mart/fast food service stops on the motorways, also useful in their own way and like a servo on serious steroids.

In New York it took me a few days to work out why a city similar to Melbourne in so many ways felt so unbalancing. Sure, there was a different mix of cultures and language, and a much more urban and dense environment with many millions more people packed in, but we are both primarily Western, English-speaking, multicultural, cosmopolitan cities with a strong liberal artsy element and a great familiarity, at least from our end, through a lifetime of TV and film.

So what made me feel so off-kilter, so surprised, so much like I was struggling with the basics?

As we went about our days gathering activities and things, we began to search for those goods and services we needed. We needed stamps and letterboxes for our postcards. We needed supermarkets so we could cook. We needed internet access to keep up with our online worlds. We needed bookshops and cafes and banks. And we needed a beer.

What was missing from the streets of New York was so those services and facilities that we expect to see in any shopping centre at home - post offices, supermarkets, internet cafes, bookshops, cafes, banks and pubs. It meant we had to work out where these things were sold if not where we expected them, and that we had to re-think how certain services are offered.

In NYC we saw very few post offices and although we could buy stamps elsewhere, the lack of the post office as a business centre of sorts where you can pay bills, buy mobile phones and transfer money, was marked. The main post office, although open 24 hours a day, had a pitiful shop to buy mailing boxes in,and as far as we could see, offered mailing services only.

There were, where we stayed in Spanish Harlem, small grocery stores carrying roughly what I would expect to find in a milkbar plus some fresh food, lined up and proliferating block by block. But no supermarkets - perhaps outside of Manhattan.

ATMs were mostly found in almost every one of these grocery stores. This was the primary souce of getting hot fresh cash. Bank branches were midtown only and most banks after hours required you to swipe in with their own bankcard to use the ATM.

We saw some internet cafes, but only after we'd used one. In fact, to find that one in Chinatown we prevailed upon a nice lady in a shop to let us Google local internet cafes. The irony was palpable.

And despite the behemoth booksellers of Barnes & Noble and Borders, we saw only one or two of them and virtually no secondhand dealers except for the dusty specialists in Greenwich Village. Also, while we expected to see those American bookshops everywhere but didn't, we didn't see the spawning multitude of Starbucks we expected either. In fact, I'd venture that there are more in London. In London Starbucks is supplemented by Coffee Republic, Cafe Nero and Costa, whereas in New York we saw only a couple of Cafe Miros. Neither city, but especially New York, has small cafes where you would expect to meet someone, have a casual business meeting or take a break from shopping, and we wondered if this in fact contributed to the legendary (and now confirmed by our aching legs) manic pace of Manhattanites - they are simply not encouraged but their urban environment to stop.

Finally, there are great swathes of Manhattan without pubs or even bars. You can usually go into a restaurant and sit up at their bar, but that's not really the point. We felt like alcoholics searching so painfully for a pint.

All of this came into sharp focus when I landed in London. In Central London, and in most local high streets, I can expect to walk for no more than 10 minutes before finding a Royal Mail office, 5 minutes before finding a bank, 3 minutes before I come across a Tesco or Sainsbury, and certainly no more than 1 before finding a pint! It's not that post offices, banks, supermarkets and the like are qualifiers for society; it's that Australia being so much closer to the UK in history and culture, our cities are laid our with a similar idea in mind. We share so much with the US, but not the constitution of our cityscape.

Travel opens minds to culture, art, history, language, architecture, religion, society and environment - but also to those everyday things we never have pause to consider.

London Vegan Day, or: HappySad

When I was a child I had a little rag doll I called HappySad. On one side her face was smiling and rosy-cheeked, but flip her over and she wept little blue paint tears from her Janus head. I feel a little like HappySad today after the London Vegan Festival.

I visited with fellow PPK-ers Pete F, lemon_spot and zuzucooks, representing Walthamstowe and Cheltenham, UK, and Chicago, USA, respectively. We made quite the intercontinetnal cyberspace foursome as we met at Kensington High Street Tube.

The London Vegan Festival is in its tenth year and it was absolutely jam packed with stalls, exhibitors, and, most importantly, visitors.

What made Miss T happy? It was so exciting to see people from all walks of life, ranging from cyberpunks to goths to feral earthmothers to Christians to Vegan Runners to Vegan Weightlifters (bless!) to normal everyday Mr and Mrs Averages. Children ran around, parents sampled food, teenagers bought badges, and everyone shuffled along in the massive crowds from one stall to another. The range of food included produce such as Sheese, Cheezly and other established companies, to freshly prepared Caribbean and raw food, to home made sweets. Although we chose not to attend any of the presentations, there seemed to be a good balance between kids' activities, stimulating discussion, and musical and comedy performances (and to be honest, quite a lot of New Age wankery and other rubbish. I will never accept that the animal rights agenda is inconsistent with companion animals. Piss off).

What made Miss T sad? It's easy in the midst of all this happy, warm-fuzzy, food-oriented togetherness to forget exactly what atrocities continue to be committed. The stalls from various animal rights, welfare, liberation and action groups presented graphic reminders of just what the ugly reasons I went vegan are: the fur trade; animal testing and experimentation; greyhound cruelty; fishing practices; the incredible penal sentences handed out to animal rights activists (and I know many of them did appalling, un-condonable things, but many did not and received what are by any measure excessive and purely punitive sentences); the condition of dairy cows and egg-producing chickens; and the everyday cruelty of some people to their animals - all shocked me and made me unspeakably sad.

I know that when I was vegetarian I consistently and deliberately drew an impenetrable veil across what I knew occurred to give me my milk in my coffee, my eggs on my plate, and my leather on my shoes and slung across my shoulders. I know how easy and effective it is to slam that door of denial shut, and I had thought that when that horror fully dawned on me that my eyes had opened and that I could, would, and did face it with clarity and honesty. But when I saw those pictures - of tiny monkeys clinging to their rescuers and sucking their thumbs, of greyhounds with their ears hacked off to prevent identification, of foxes with their legs stripped down to the bone - I knew I hadn't the courage. I haven't watched any of the DVDs filmed inside animal experimentation laboratories or chicken farms; I haven't pursued any activities beyond my own veganism; and I have let that veil come down again, just further away from my eyes. I am sad.

I don't intend to start breaking into battery farms or laboratories. I don't intend to commit criminal damage. I maintain that although there is a place for direct action, it is easy to be counter-productive within that sphere and it is simply not how I think I can best help. But I think I should do something. I must.

Whole Foods London, or: Imitation is the best form of flattery

So after my incredulous wonder at the brilliance of Whole Foods New York, the London branches I have visited so far come as something of a cross-making affair. They also seem to be in some relationship with Fresh'n'Wild which I haven't quite worked out (in the Bowery there was a Fresh'n'Wild stand, but here in London the connection seems to be greater and more explicit).

I've visited two branches - Soho and Kensington High Street - and have found both wanting in their own ways.

The Soho branch, not surprisingly for its location, is small and therefore more in the nature of a large health food shop. No wuckers. What is wuckers is the vitally restricted, oily, and boring buffet.

The Ken High branch does not suffer the space restrictions of it Soho sister. Indeed, it sprawls arms and legs akimbo across three prairie-like floors, putting one in mind of what a WalMart might feel like except a hundred times more expensive and fancy la-la.

The buffet at Ken High, like the Bowery, is three buffets long. However, you can't mix hot and cold due to VAT reasons, and the selection has none of the exoticism (for me, anyway) of NYC such as endamame, wakame, soba noodles and fried plantains. The dishes are good, but very same-same, and the green plastic reusable bowls they give out are shaped in the most ridiculous way with a pointy bottom that obliges one to plonk all one's food on top of itself, causing a most deleterious mixing and great annoyance to the eater. It is somewhat ameliorated by the presence of real cutlery but frankly the crockery situation leaves much to be reformed.

But what really got one's bloody goat was the price. In NYC the buffet cost US$7.99 per pound (lb). Google informs me that one kilo is about 2.2lb. 2.2 times $7.99 = $17.57, so that's equivalent to US$17.57 per kilo (stop me if I'm wrong here. I might be on a fast track to mathematical oblivion).

In London - High St Ken - the buffet costs £1.79 per 100 grams, or £17.90 per kilo. £17.90 in US dollars, according to www.xe.com, is US$31.60. So a kilo of buffet in the Bowery costs US$17.57, and a kilo of buffet in High St Ken costs US$31.60.

Below: almost 11 quid worth at Whole Foods, High Street Kensington. It's about 610 grams.

Below: US$22ish worth of food at Whole Foods, the Bowery - roughly the same price as the teensy mouthfuls above, and more than a kilo in weight (it's got two layers ... both different).





Now is that right (I mean both is my maths correct and is it morally, ethically, sensibly ok)?

Organic food is pricey enough as it is. Perhaps it's even more so in the UK, but I find it hard to believe that it's near on twice as much. Maybe it's the clientele expected around Kensington. Maybe it's the rent to cover the three gigantor floors that I imagine is equally big. Maybe it's just the going rate. But it puts the availability of fresh, organic, vegan food in a variety of dishes more out of my reach and therefore I assume some other people's reach too, which is never a great thing.

Apologies if my maths is crap and I've made this up. Either way I'm really cross about the £10.92 I paid for two-thirds of sod-all for lunch.

Food For Thought, or: My dear old friend, how I love you

Food For Thought, F4T, my dear old friend. I first met you in June 2000, when London seemed to be blooming from its concrete and bricks, as pubs festooned themselves with artfully planted flower boxes and hanging baskets, colours chosen for complement as much as cheer. F4T, I loved your stoneware crockery, your stools for those with short and stumpy legs, and your genuinely communal tables (take note, Wagamama!). Your hot, simple, unpretentious food has had me coming back ever since.

Today's dishes reminded me of why I am so perpetually fond of you. Your stir-fried veggies with ginger and tamari atop brown rice, although lukewarm at best, retain the taste of each vegetable without making me feel like I'm eating a raw salad. I season from your darling little stone pinchbowls full of salt and pepper, which remain on the table customer in, customer out, oblivious to any potential health risks - but that's the beauty of you, F4T.


But today, my treasured friend, I want to tell you how much you outclassed yourself with your vegan apple, pear and rhubarb crumble (as if 'class' means a jot to you, you egalitarian heart-of-my-heart!). Your crumble was full of chunks of fruit, each determinedly retaining its own flavour but forming a perfect whole, and steaming, piping hot under its cover of sweet, crumbly crumble. F4T, your crumble was honest, decent home food par excellence (although you'd never be so gauche - oh I did it again! - as to use French phrases like that) ... Your crumble was spring, it was summer, it was a cottage kitchen, it was climbing fruit trees, it was an apron dusted with flour, it was Britain and it made me happy.


I love you, Food For Thought, and I promise to keep coming to see you as long as we both shall live.


Food For Thought Cafe: 31 Neal Street, Covent Garden, WC2H 9PR, ph. 0871 3328808