A free download for Veganuary 2026 – Well Fed, Not An Animal Dead by Graham Burnett (1992 edition)

The seeds of our best-selling publication  The Vegan Book of Permaculture were sown way back in 1985, with the production of a tiny but influential photocopied pamphlet called Well Fed Not An Animal Dead. This is the story of this DIY vegan classic. Although long out of print you can download it here, or by clicking the image above…

Even as a small child in the 1960s I seemed to make the mental connection between the cows I would see in fields on Sunday drives out to the countryside with my grandparents, and the meat on my plate that would then be served up for lunch. I became vegetarian when I left school in 1977, but by the early 1980s I’d begun to realise that the dairy industry had as much (if not more) involvement in animal cruelty as the meat industry.  In 1984 I finally joined the dots and become vegan myself, also taking on an allotment with a small group of local punks and eco-activists, as documented in this blog post from 2024.

It was a year or so later in 1985 that I produced a tiny A6 16 page zine called Well Fed, Not An Animal Dead. I basically wrote and drew it by hand, as a way of passing the time whilst bored in the office where I ‘worked’ at the time. This is also where it  was printed, surreptitiously on the office photocopier. The title was suggested by another good friend, Southend punk and fellow vegan Paul ‘Polly’ Dossor (get in touch if you are still out there mate!). It was mainly put together to provide a selection of simple vegan recipes as a positively-focused answer to people who kept asking me why I hadn’t died from a lack of eggs and cows milk in my diet. A lot of people were genuinely interested in wanting to know what vegans actually did eat, and so I could easily just hand them a copy when the subject came up. It was also a little celebration of what was at the time a fast growing movement, embraced by many of my friends and peers who had had their awareness of animal exploitation raised by the early 1980s punk scene and bands such as Flux of Pink Indians with their succinctly entitled album ‘Strive To Survive Causing the Least Suffering Possible’, plus The Smiths and Conflict, who both had (very different) songs addressing the idea that ‘meat is murder’. I posted up a facsimile of this original 1985 mini-zine a while ago, which you can You can still download by clicking the image below.

By the early 1990s the  Well Fed… zine had grown to 48 A5 pages, a ‘source-book’ full of vegan recipes with supplementary information about vegan nutrition, making your own booze, vegan-organic food growing, foraging for edible wild plants and raising vegan children. This remained in print more or less constantly with only a few minor changes and updates from 1992 until 2014. I have no idea how many copies were produced, especially taking into account bootlegged ‘pirate’ editions and unofficial translations including French and Croatian, but the numbers circulating must run into the thousands! Here’s a nice little blog post about this edition, complete with the blogger’s additional annotations in the margins, from the very lovely Violet’s V*gan E-Comics…

Well Fed… was finally superseded by the massively expanded and rewritten Vegan Book of Permaculture published by the lovely folk at Permanent Publications in 2014, and has been out of print since then. Making it available again online is something I’ve been meaning to do for some time, so when better than an unofficial marking of Veganuary 2026? I’m glad to see that four decades on from 1985 ‘plant-based’ lifestyles are now pretty much mainstream, although there is still a long way to go in terms of how our food is actually produced by corporate globalised food production systems. Created in the punk spirit of the DIY ethic,  Well Fed… is maybe a bit more grass-roots and homespun than some of the glossy celebrity-endorsed cookbooks and lifestyle guides around these days, but at least it comes from the heart and maybe even represents a little bit of the history of vegan permaculture, as well as the ongoing movement towards another, more compassionate world that is possible. I hope folks enjoy it or even find it useful!

Graham Burnett is the author of The Vegan Book of Permaculture – order your SIGNED copy today or buy it together with Permaculture A Beginner’s Guide for the special price of just £23!

Order The Vegan Book of Permaculture now!