Review

Need a Bit of Cooking Inspiration?

Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World, 2nd. ed.

By Denis Faye
January 28. 2010

On the other hand, you’ll find not so much as a boiled-egg recipe in Vegan Freak. In fact, you’ll find very little useful information at all. Instead, you’ll get a 217-page diatribe from two very militant vegans who apparently feel anyone who doesn’t see the world exactly as they do is a complete monster. Any karma these two may have earned treating animals fairly has probably been voided thanks to the bile they spit on these pages.

The book is intended to be a hilarious primer for people interested in making the animal-products-free shift, but it fails on so many levels. They operate on the assumption that non-vegans make it their lives’ work to torment and mock the chosen few who have seen the meat-free light. Then, with no apparent awareness of their hypocrisy, they go on to mock non-vegans with such rancor that were I on the fence about giving up animal products, I’d run out and buy a pair of Doc Martens boots and a hamburger about halfway through the book just to spite them. (Full disclosure: I’m a pescatarian and agree with many of their stances, if not their attitude.)

More importantly, they don’t even start offering usable information on going vegan until three-quarters of the way through, and even then, a lot of that advice involves suggesting other books to check out.

So I suggest you skip Vegan Freak and check out those other books instead. If you want to learn more about veganism, save yourself a lot of bad juju and check out Becoming Vegan by Brenda Davis for great how-to tips, and Veganomicon by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero for tons of great recipes.

No one likes it when sweet ol’ Bessie the cow takes a bolt to the head, Mr. and Mrs. Torres, but life’s too short to be that much of a hater.

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