Moby Has the Vegan Croissant Thing Figured Out

I saw your “ soup in the suburbs ” Instagram post in February, which I love as, shit, there’s Moby making soup in the suburbs! And then, in 1987, I became a vegan, and at that point, obviously, there were almost no vegan restaurants in the world—and I was broke, so even if there had been vegan restaurants, I wouldn’t have been able to eat at them. In order to stay alive and to feed myself, I had to learn how to cook, so I was suddenly presented with this fact that.

I realized I could spend $10 and basically pick up enough ingredients to make soup that would feed me for a week. Well, at the time, it was the sort of inescapable realization that I couldn’t care about animals and as well contribute to their suffering and death. But I just realized I couldn’t get around the simple fact that, as someone who had so much love. Gratitude for animals, I just couldn’t, in good conscience, be involved in anything that caused or contributed to their suffering.

Morrissey comes to mind as somebody who has been quite famous for doing this, and I tried to research if you had done this at any of your points to, and it doesn’t seem like you have. I’m thrilled, in a way, that they do that, but I as well like the idea of reaching people where they are, and obviously, we vegans do have a reputation for sometimes being didactic and shrill.

So it’s just part and parcel of being an activist, but I have to try to remember who I was before I went vegan and how I would have responded. Going to If I was 18 years old, and I went to a venue, and they, vegan, I would have just been annoyed at the vegans.

So I do my cleaning, I do my landscaping, I do all my cookery, I do all my shopping, and, as far as preparation goes, I’d say—especially since the pandemic kicked off—99.99999 percent of the meals I’ve had have been cooked by me at home. Yeah, well, okay . . . so, in 1987—actually, right before I went vegan (I went vegan in November of 1987, so the summer of 1987)—I had a French girlfriend who lived in the States, and I saved up money and went with her to France.

And we would get pots of tea, and croissants with different spreads, and just sit there for hours, and it was really idyllic. And it’s true, with a lot of the food in the cookbook and a lot of the Little Pine food; there’s a danger element to it, as a lot of it is very indulgent.

Which wasn’t always the case with vegan food… The vegan world, as we know, for the longest time, tried to make everything virtuous. It was—I made peace with it, but I have to say, it’s nice to be virtuous and healthy the vast majority of the time; if you go out to a restaurant, and you order dessert—we’re all adults, we know what we’re doing.

Do you withdrawal anything? [Laughs.] Clearly, with Limp Bizkit and Metallica being the headliners—and in addition, this was 1999—it’s safe to say, now, any festival you go to, there’s bound to be a couple vegan food trucks. We played on the first day, and, as I say in the documentary, it was a hellhole by the end of the first day.

I don’t know when Amy’s began selling frozen foods in health food stores, but by 1999, the freezer on my tour bus was filled with Amy’s, and it felt magical. By 1999, I’m pretty sure that what I had at Woodstock was microwaved enchiladas on the tour bus.

From the New York Times best-selling author and his superteam of chefs, the first edition of Ottolenghi Test Kitchen, christened Shelf Love , features 85-plus irresistible recipes for relaxed, flexible home cookery that will bring the love to every shelf in your pantry, fridge, and freezer.