Veggie Krisha saves the day

Just a short walk from the colourful Camden market with its bright T-shirts, fancy dresses and Bob Marley music, the poorest of the poor queue in the rain without any obvious reason. Tired looking men in their forties, punks who drink out of a bottle in a Sainsbury’s bag and old women with muddy jumpers pull miserable faces while standing in line with their look straight ahead. Suddenly, a van stops and the faces light up.

Camden Town is one of the stops of the Food For All-van that distributes free vegetarian food to people suffering from homelessness, poverty, unemployment or mental or physical disabilities.
This much needed help is organized by London’s Hare Krishna, a religious movement that has its roots in Hinduism. In this movement, meat, fish, eggs, onions, garlic and mushrooms are avoided because of the belief that certain kinds of nutrition affect the consciousness in a bad way. “You are what you eat,” says the head of the charity, Peter O’Grady. “Whatever you eat, affects your consciousness.”

Strangely, most of the homeless people are not vegetarians. Even though there are many soup kitchens that offer meat for lunch in London, some people prefer to stand in the cold and eat their vegetarian food on the street. Mara, a homeless old woman, admits: “No, I am not a vegetarian. But the food is good. I come here every day.”

Ralf, a member of Hare Krishna, who distributes the free food in the van, explains: “People with health problems come to the van, because the food is digested easily.” After handing out a plate with rice and beans to a young man with red long hair and a dirty leather jacket, he continues: “People come here very ill, eat the food and get healthy again. Food is so powerful when it is made with love and devotion. Some people even give up their old lifestyle.”

Peter O’Grady says that he serves God by giving out free food. However, he does not feel the need to kill animals. “In fact,” he goes on, “I believe that there is a connection between bad karma and killing animals.” According to his belief, vegetarian food is “blessed food”. By giving out this food to homeless people, he blesses them.

Apart from his religious reasons to avoid meat, Peter O’Grady is also an economical vegetarian. He explains that “the meat industry uses ten times more crop than human beings eat. Without the meat consumption there would be ten times more crop to feed people.”

The van stops in Kentish Town, Camden Town and at Kings Cross for an hour each. Together with two rickshaws that supply students with a vegetarian meal on two university campuses, Food For All feeds 800 hungry mouths every day.

The charity picks up food products from supermarkets that have been over produced, gone out of date or wrongly packaged. The meals are cooked every morning in the kitchen of Watford’s Hare Krishna temple.

The charity has won the city award of 2007 for their successful green community based project. That this act of “love and devotion”, as Peter O’Grady calls it, is much needed, expresses one homeless person by saying that: “I don't get money from social security and there is no where I can get food from. I completely rely on the centre for my food and if it wasn't here I would probably die.” Another claimed: “If it were not here I would be begging money from cash points and shop lifting to earn money for food.”