Skip to main content

Cruelty-Free Kitchen

January 12, 2025
 I have been so moved by the many Palestinians in Gaza who are supporting their community while also experiencing the same hardship and dangerous conditions as those around them. There are a number of individuals and groups who are doing amazing work, embodying compassion and love in all of their actions. I hope to write about more of them in the coming days. And to start things off tonight, I want to share with you some information about one particular group whose members are doing all they can to take care of both the animals and the people while they are all suffering from the unrelenting violence of this genocide. 

They are called the “Cruelty-Free Kitchen,” and they were founded by five wonderful people: Walid, Amjad, Abood, Mahmoud, and Mo. From their fundraiser page: 

“With support from our donations, the kitchen has successfully distributed thousands of meals, ensuring that hundreds upon hundreds of people—mostly children—are able to leave with food in their bellies.”


Children in Gaza waiting for and receiving food from the community kitchen

Until the siege on Northern Gaza, the Cruelty-Free Kitchen had partnered with World Central Kitchen, which helped with supplies. However, this is no longer possible, and the team is now relying on our support more than ever. As conditions in the north grow even more dire with little to no aid crossing into the region, supplies are getting harder to find and prices have grown exorbitantly high. 


In addition to the team in the North, there’s an extension of the Cruelty-Free Kitchen in Central Gaza. Mo, Walid's cousin, is living in a tent camp, doing his best to supply those around him with fresh bread, water, and occasionally treats for the children. If the kitchen in North Gaza is ever forced to stop operating, the remaining funds will be redirected to Mo’s efforts in Deir al Balah to keep his bakery running and provide clean water.


The love and compassion these amazing men show to everyone around them every single day is beautiful and deserves our support. They are also enduring tremendous losses of their own, and they face countless dangers every day. I think of them often and search for their updates every day. I am continually affected by their compassion and love.


You can learn more about the work they do by following them on Twitter, and you can also help support them and their efforts by donating to the fundraiser for Cruelty Free Kitchen, as well as to the members’ individual fundraisers, which helps to support them so they can also take care of their own families and the animals they care for and also continue this work.  



And a very special and personal thank you to Abood for connecting with me online about all of this. When I expressed my appreciation to him for all that he is doing, he shared:


"This is our duty towards all the innocent creatures here. Helping them gives me hope to survive and continue helping with loyal and wonderful friends. We love peace, security and stability, helping others is a small part of what motivates us to continue in order to stay strong and continue to help all the innocent creatures here in North Gaza.”


Please support these beautiful people however you can. (And to any returning #vegan readers out there who are reading this, supporting this kitchen and its founders is also a great way for us to further align our supportive actions with our vegan ethics.)

--January 12, 2025

Popular posts from this blog

A Letter to College & University Presidents & Administrators

December 30, 2024 It is winter break right now at the university where I work, which is also the same university where I was once a student, many years ago. The campus is very quiet and the days have been very dark. Students have gone home to be with their families and loved ones until the new year and term begins.   With the cyclical nature of a life that has been long influenced by the recurrence of patterns driven by the timing of the academic calendar, I recognize that this time of year is often one of intense reflection for me. I have taken some time off from my job, and I have spent these last days doing more of what I have also been doing these past fifteen months, determined to not become immobilized by disbelief, despair, and grief, something which becomes increasingly challenging for me with each passing day. I have seen students in Gaza study by flame and torch light in the midst of falling bombs; students giving their thesis presentations in makeshift tents, wandering t...
Read more

About This Site

I used to write about food…. This site used to be about vegan food and being vegan. From 2008 to 2016, I wrote and published weekly. I enjoyed creating and sharing recipes, eating at and writing about restaurants, exploring in words and in life how food could bring people together. I ended up finding a community of vegans that I had not known prior to my writing, and I saw how writing and sharing could lead to connection and change. I stopped writing and publishing regularly on this site in 2019 but decided to leave it up, unpublishing many articles about restaurants that no longer existed, thinking someday I might return to writing here again. And now at last I have decided to do just that. But I can no longer write about food, at least not in the way that I once did.  I believe there is a certain kind of trauma caused by witnessing violence and brutality inflicted upon people, animals, and the earth while also being unable to stop it; that there is trauma in witnessing human-caus...
Read more

An Urgent Update & Request for Action

February 2, 2025 In a way this isn't an update, because what I am sharing is nothing new. And the urgency I feel and speak of also isn't new. But it continues to grow, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour.  So think of this as more of a reminder, an emphatic expression of urgency, of our required commitment, of our shared responsibility, and of reaffirming my own resolve to do more, say more, share more, in the hopes that the changes that are long overdue will come. And that they will come soon.  The destruction and devastation in Gaza is unlike anything I have ever seen before in my life. And the images and videos and descriptions cannot compare to the physical experience of being there and trying to live through this, trying to survive among the ruins and the rubble, trying to breathe through the dust and the dirt, trying to find life amidst death and deprivation. Trying to keep going despite the overwhelming sense of abandonment sinking like a heavy cloud atop t...
Read more