An Animal Rights/Vegan Activists' Strategies Article used with permission from All-Creatures.org

After the successful Together Around Food (TAF) pilot this summer, Sailesh Rao discusses how ordinary potlucks can be reimagined within the TAF framework to help usher in a healthy, sustainable, vegan future.

From Potlucks to TAFs
From Sailesh Rao, ClimateHealers.org
August 2026

Images from Canva

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” – African Proverb.

Dear Climate Healers,

As a species, we separated ourselves from Nature and went fast to heat up the planet and prevent the Earth from reverting to glaciation during the Holocene era. Now we are seeking to become sustainable, which is to go far and thrive for millions of years into the future. For this, we need to go together with each other and with Nature, not alone.

The world going Vegan is the necessary first step in this journey of reconciliation with Nature. As Vegans, we are used to hosting Vegan potlucks, which is essentially a Planet A style endeavor. In contrast, Together Around Food (TAF) is a Planet B style endeavor.

Both TAF and the Vegan potluck put shared meals at the center of community life, but they operate at entirely different scales and serve different theories of change. One is a decades-old grassroots tradition; the other is a new, deliberately systemic experiment. Comparing them says less about which food tastes better and more about two competing strategies for moving the world toward Veganism.

The Vegan potluck is our movement’s oldest and most familiar gathering format. Each participant brings a Vegan dish to share, usually to a home or community center, and the group eats, mingles and swaps recipes. It is low-cost, endlessly repeatable and it functions more as reinforcement and community-building than outreach.

Together Around Food (TAF) is different. It inverts the potluck entirely. Instead of asking individuals to bring vegan dishes, it asks them to bring ingredients for a curated menu, and the group cooks together. When a group of Vegans cook together, they can pool their resources and cook extra for the Vegan outreach to their neighbors. The menu is published online and the doors of the community center are opened to the public for a free gourmet, whole-food, plant-based Vegan meal that anyone can come and enjoy. The team doing the cooking can then host a short lecture and hand out educational materials so that effective Vegan outreach occurs along with community building.

TAF helps groups of people go Vegan together, supported by groups of Vegans doing the cooking and hosting together. TAF can be hosted regularly, say once a week to begin with, and eventually on a daily basis as the local Vegan community grows. Ultimately, when TAF events become commonplace, members in the community would discover that their cost of food has actually decreased compared to their Planet A days when they were cooking alone, since there is very little wastage of food ingredients. Besides, the ingredients are also being purchased in bulk with minimal packaging overhead.

Then the talk of who is going to fund TAF would become irrelevant. So the next time you are planning to join a potluck, why not ask if it can be turned into a TAF event? We are happy to host your TAF event on https://togetheraround.food. Please contact us at [email protected] for any help with the event hosting.

The 15-day Together Around Food pilot that we ran in Jefferson County, Washington State, is included in a new technical paper on the planetary emergency we face, with Planet B (Veganism) as its resolution. The paper has just been published in the peer-reviewed MDPI Journal of Sustainability and it contains references to Veganism throughout.

As you can see, we have burst through the cocoon of silence around Veganism in the mainstream academic discourse. This Emergence of Planet B will be the theme of the upcoming in-person Vegan Convergence Of the Peoples #27 (V-COP27), which will be hosted in Sadhana Forest, Auroville, TN, India, from Friday, Nov 6, 2026 through Sunday, Nov 8, 2026. Please save the dates and plan to join us, especially if you are already in India. More details will be coming soon.

With much love,
Sailesh on behalf of the Climate Healers Core team. (Alex, Alison, Amit, Anne, Carl, Dakota, Dani, Deborah, Debra, Gabriele, Gerard, Giva, Jamen, Jim, Kelly, Ken, Krish, Krishna, Lisa, Liz, Madhuri, Maggie, Marco, Mike, Paige, Pareen, Paul, Ray, Rebecca, Sailesh, Sarah, Shankar, Stacey, Suzanne, Tami and Vega, the Cow and Climate Healer and her Veguitas)

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Posted on All-Creatures.org: August 6, 2026
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