With New Cookbook, PETA Reworks Pita, Other Vegan Foods

It’s an established cliché that throughout their four years in college the majority of students will subsist on instant Ramen noodles and peanut butter sandwiches. But a new cookbook sponsored by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals encourages undergraduates to channel their inner Julia Child. “PETA’s Vegan College Cookbook” offers a slew of recipes that reinvent basic survival items—such as the aforementioned instant pasta or peanut butter—in the form of quick-fix dishes appropriate for any meal of the day.

At a cooking demonstration and book-signing event Tuesday at the Harvard Coop Bookstore, Starza Kolman and Marta Holmberg, who are involved in PETA’s youth division, prepared three of their favorite dishes from the cookbook: Seven-Layer Mexican Dip, Silence of the Lambs Shepherd’s Pie, and Boozy Beer Bread. They offered a sampling of each dish to the audience and shared their personal experiences on dealing with the difficulties of being vegans in college.

“You’re not quite sure just what to eat when you first go vegetarian or vegan, and that was one of the reasons why I was excited to work on the cookbook in the first place,” Holmberg said.

Kolman added that the compilation of recipes was the product of searching for creative ways to adapt to a vegan lifestyle in a college environment not usually amenable to special dietary concerns.

“We struggled through finding something to eat on a regular basis,” she said. “Needless to say, these recipes are something that we ate in college... and that we are able to share with everybody else.” As Holmberg and Kolman reiterated throughout their demonstration, they hope this cookbook will help make student transitions to veganism as easy a process as possible.

“We hear from hundreds of college students every year... who write to us for vegan recipes. But they want them to be easy, and they want them to be delicious,” Holmberg said.

What the recipes lack in original ingredients, they more than make up for with creative spins on preparation techniques. The most clunky and advanced piece of equipment this cookbook requires is a microwave oven. “We decided to go with the microwave simply because it’s so much more accessible than a stove or an oven,” Holmberg said. “You can find them in a dorm room, hotel rooms, offices.”

However, it might take some coaxing (and several free samples) before students are sold on the techniques presented in the book—such as using a microwave to make bread. Boozy Beer Bread, as the name implies, makes good use of another college survival item by incorporating one full can of stale, flat beer into batter, creating a surprisingly delicious treat with a texture similar to that of traditionally baked bread—but with PETA’s interpretation, one can have fresh bread in a matter of minutes, rather than hours.

Besides college-friendly snacks and appetizers, the cookbook also features its own take on comfort food classics. For Silence of the Lambs Shepherd’s Pie, Kolman uses ingredients that could be found in the HUDS serveries, such as canned vegetables, Boca meat crumbles, and instant mashed potatoes, to creat a meal even the most devoted carnivores would be hard-pressed to turn down.

From the casual demeanor of the event’s facilitators to the no-fuss nature of the recipes they prepared, Kolman and Holmberg presented an appetizing introduction to a generally misunderstood way of life. They wisely avoided a pedantic strategy in favor of a more interactive presentation; with inventive takes on classic dishes and snacks, they attempted to dispel the notion of vegan cuisine as hippie, organic food reminiscent of cardboard.

“We want to show people that if you can be a vegan in college,” Holmberg said, “you can be a vegan anywhere.”

—Staff writer Eunice Y. Kim can be reached at kim30@fas.harvard.edu.