The Vegan Thread

Have you taken delivery of your cheese order yet?

ooooooooo coleslaw. cheers.

where do i buy

Cheers - didnt think about the aub. Got some sweet pots on the list.

nice one. only got a big tesco round me atm. so will have to slum it this time.

Tesco do some good vegan stuff- they have the Richmond (vegan ofc) sausages which I imagine will be good on the bbq. Can get a frozen box of em for like £2

Slice it in half top to tail, score it in criss crosses almost to the skin, brush in olive oil and a bit of salt. Delicious

That looks banging!

I have! Had a banging cheese platter yesterday, planning to make pizza to try out the mozzarella soon.
Ordered some of their fig salami as well, not sure I'd bother again, it's basically just smashed up figs with pepper in it.

I got it from a Chinese supermarket here in Leeds. Think it's about £1.75 a packet.

Ah yes, I should probably have mentioned that I didn't particularly like the fig salami. Sorry. I'd half-forgotten that they make it, as I'm usually just fixated on the cheese. Let us know how the notzzarella works with the pizza. I haven't tried it yet, hope it's good.

The salami isn't bad, just not up to the standard of the cheese! Will report back on the pizza.

You can get the spicy tofu here as well. Last time I picked some up was at the Longdan on Kingsland Road. The Asian grocer in the old Stratford mall used to have it as well, but I've not been there for a while.

Just for an hour or so, firms it up a bit.

Thanks for the I am nut ok tip. Just placed an order. They’ve got a sale on right now too! Now gotta make plans for tasty bread!

I can't remember seeing this before--only just spotted it when looking up where the previous tag was:

https://www.happycow.net/reviews/tsujiri-matcha-house-london-192962

Does anyone know if they've stayed vegan? The web-site doesn't show anything to me (may be a Javascript issue, or maybe they've closed?).

South and North by Turnpike Lane sells it
https://foursquare.com/v/south-and-north-oriental-supermarket/4f1af201754a4cd5a23e8db4

In case anyone visits Leeds and thought about visiting Temple Donuts. Maybe don't, it turns out one of the owners is a very sketchy bloke who, at best, has a strange obsession with nazi imagery and at worst, is a full blown white supremacist. It all came to light when a former employee spoke out about racist abuse towards them being swept under the rug by management.
They've deleted all of their social media accounts but somebody was thoughtful enough to set them up a new Instagram account to keep track of all of their bad behaviour. Here's a link. CW: racism, abuse.

Reminiscent of all that stuff about the alleged Neo-Nazi sympathiser who opened a vegan place in Camden. That all seems to have died down, although perhaps it hasn't and I just haven't been paying attention.

I'm honestly not sure how it took so long for it all to come out. Temple's been open for a reasonably long time and he's a fairly well known tattoo artist. I know that a lot of tattoo artists flirt with dodgy imagery (plenty of swastikas knocking about, unconvincingly explained away as symbols pre-dating the Nazis) but there are some symbols he's used that are explicitly Nazi and don't really have any other meaning as far as I can tell.

I can't speak to any of the accusations about James as I don't know him - but regarding Simon, I can only say that the suggestion that he's a neo-nazi or white supremacist is absolutely bat-shit insane. He's a biker and a tattooist, with an avid interest in the occult/slasher-horror-movie culture, and using these selective screengrabs of (non-nazi) swastikas as a kind of 'gotcha' is ridiculous (even if I completely understand why some people are uncomfortable with the imagery or the reclamation of the symbol - I'm probably one of those people myself!).

Full disclosure - I do have tattoos from him, and have a few close friends who are close friends (out-and-out lefties, for what it's worth).

Anecdotally - recently he did a tattoo with a crusader (or maybe St George) having their head cut off or something, and a right-winger took issue with it in the comments - Simon replied, in detail, explaining the racist roots of the crusades and basically telling this dude to go fuck himself.

Gaaaah, it's really really hard to try and respond to these kind of allegations, even as a third party - the accusations are made in such a way that almost any rebuttal can be twisted and used against you.

I just feel strongly that this is something that can ruin a small business that people have poured their life-savings into, based on spurious smears that a very small but vocal part of the left (especially online) have a tendency to jump on before examining things in closer detail.

Hmmm, I don't know Simon personally but it's not just swastikas he seems keen on. There's a few images he's posted contains symbols almost exclusively used by neo-Nazi groups and he's flirted with using the SS symbol and things like that.
Even if you disregard that, the way they've dealt with racism in their business has been piss poor. The fact that it was swept under the rug and no action was taken against an employee for overt racism in the workplace until they started to receive a huge amount of negative press seems like they, at best, didn't take the whole thing seriously at all.

Edit: anyway, I don't want to derail this thread, there's plenty of information on that Instagram account for people to use to make their own minds up!

I certainly don't think that a discussion of this very concerning topic is a derail of this thread. When I first heard about accusations that vegans were, more or less secretly, Neo-Nazis, and were apparently trying to recruit impressionable people on-line through veganism, I was completely shocked. I also once encountered someone vegan who, when the conversation turned to something connected with Nazism, reacted in such a strange way that I got the impression he was of that persuasion. It wasn't pursued and wasn't clear enough, but it was still worrying.

Many people have inconsistent beliefs; they may be completely convinced of beliefs that clash with one another, obviously aided and abetted by all the misinformation on the Internet. In a way, we shouldn't be surprised that vegans are not immune from this, but it is particularly baffling that people who otherwise embrace principles of living cruelty-free would somehow subscribe to the cruellest and worst ideology ever concocted. I think one has to examine the processes of reasoning individually, although obviously there will be patterns and shared views in peer groups. There are many ways of making a mistake at some point, and likewise many people don't stick with hateful views forever or even for very long, but what you see may just be them working through anger issues or other aspects of that side of theirs that somehow they have to experiment with. It's not always so easy as to hit upon the right thing and never looking left or right.

I'd say flirtation with Nazi imagery is probably a possible gateway. The question is always: 'Where does it lead?' Will people like that actually end up committing harm or will they be able to snap out of it at some point? One would hope that being vegan might eventually enable them to find consistency in their moral universe, but I guess myths like 'Hitler was vegetarian' (he was not) or the general misanthropy that you sometimes encounter in vegans (caused by the way many humans treat other animals) may play a role. Either way, it's completely confused and not good for the persons concerned, let alone for their potential victims, and it's worth keeping aware of this and being prepared in case it should rear its ugly head in our personal environment.

Anyway, I do hope the people concerned in the current example make some attempt to explain themselves or renounce how it appears. I don't know any of them, but if you do and can reach out, perhaps there are useful conversations to be had.

I mean, I can only say as much as I know of the guy directly and through good friends, and that’s that he’s not at all a neo-nazi.

It seems almost beyond parody that this has started over the last few days in response to Temple doing a benefit donut for BLM..! (not their first benefit for good political causes too)

Absolutely agree that the racist bullying from another member of staff is wholly unacceptable and that definitely could have dealt with that waaaay better. Their apology posted seemed to get that (social media pages now deleted - but quoted in a local Leeds paper).

But ultimately this seems to be a wilful conflation of taste in imagery/interests with someone’s political stance - and I can’t get behind that, especially when none of these people know the person they’re accusing. And double especially because there’s some really spurious connections going on (e.g. Black Sabbath logos using the pointy S’s) - reminds me of the satanic panic in the 80s!

It’s one thing to constructively criticise a small business’ HR practices or someone’s personal bad taste; but another to embark on a character assassination that leaves their doors plastered with ‘nazi scum’ graffiti, whole online presence brigaded with 1 star reviews, and their survival up in the air.

I think a lot of my strong feelings on this come from seeing myself hypothetically liable for the same accusations by way of a (now covered) Burzum tattoo, shirts, a load of other BM records of questionable taste, and ’edgy’ humour as a younger person - all the while having been a total lefty. Might have been a dick/fool, but certainly wasn’t a nazi.

I do actually agree that the Nazi witch hunt has got a bit out of hand. To me, not knowing the guy personally and only having screenshots of his Instagram account to go on, Simon's obsession with all of that stuff makes him seem more like a try-hard edge lord that should have grown out of it decades ago than a full blown neo nazi. However, regardless of intent, posting symbols such as The Wolfsangel, which despite having other historical meaning, is almost exclusively neo-Nazi imagery, is fucking gross. It's easy to pass things off by saying "it's meant to be provocative" when you're never likely to be affected by racist violence.
With that in mind, I think concentrating solely on Simon's sketchy online presence has really over-shadowed the issue at hand, which is that Temple Donuts have attempted to co-opt the BLM movement as a publicity exercise, whilst knowing full well that a member of their management staff has been the perpetrator of racist abuse within their workplace. If they were really so concerned about systemic racism surely they would have addressed it when it arose in their establishment first?
Of course, this is all just my take on the subject and I'm no more well informed than anybody else who's got access to Instagram.