All posts tagged: vegan festival

Impressions from Ieperfest 2019. Vegan hardcore music festival

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Ieperfest is a 3-day hardcore music festival, just outside Ypres (Ieper, 75km from Bruges, Belgium). Since day one, more than 20 years ago, all the food at Ieperfest is vegan! In previous years, the festival was mid August, but this year it has been set to the beginning of July. We just went for the afternoon, to taste some of the great food, and enjoy the atmosphere. The weather was mild (not too hot, not too cold) and luckily no showers when we were there.

VIDEO – Ableism in the vegan movement. Intro to my talk at VegfestUK – Geertrui Cazaux

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Why do we need to address ableism in the vegan and animal rights movement? This is an introduction to my talk at VegfestUK, in London, Oct 27 – 28: Ableism, bodyshaming and healthshaming, Geertrui Cazaux Transcript below. Transcript. Hello, I am Geertrui. Or, that’s Trudi in English. And I will be presenting a talk at the upcoming VegfestUK festival in London. And my talk will be about ableism in the movement. Now ableism is discrimination or prejudice against people with physical or mental disabilities. So against disabled people. Now, I can immediately hear some of you think: oh, ableism what does that have to do with veganism? Why should we be discussing this at a vegan festival? It should be about tackling speciesism. About fighting for animal rights. We shouldn’t be talking about ableism or other forms of discrimination like racism and sexism, but only focus on the animals, because it’s about the animals, right? yes, of course veganism is about tackling speciesism and about the animals, but how we deal with each other as …

First Vegan Street festival in Brussels!

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Saturday was the first edition of Vegan Street Festival in Brussels. It was organised by Veganizer BXL, and supported by the city of Brussels and Beyond Carnism. A vegan festival in the heart of Brussels, with lots of foodstalls, live music, and from 2 to 8 PM there were also talks scheduled in a nearby café. Great! The festival took place at the Marché aux poissons (the fish Market). Oh the irony, to have a vegan market here 🙂 We made sure to be there early, as we know from experience with other vegan events, that it usually gets really crowded in the afternoon, and foodstalls usually sell out after a couple of hours (which reading by the comments afterwards, was the case here too). As we were there early noon, we did not get to attend any of the talks (some talks in the morning would have been nice too). We strolled around, saw a lot of familiar faces and businesses, and chatted with friends. But also got to discover some businesses that were new …

Our visit to Veggieworld 2017, Brussels

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Veggieworld is an international vegan fair, that has been organised since 2011, in 8 different European countries. In October 2017, it was organised in Brussels for the first time. Veggieworld was located in Tour and Taxis. Nicely renovated old industrial buildings on the north side of Brussels. Parking just next door (a bit expensive, 7 euro, whether one was there for half an hour of half a day didn’t matter), good facilities (accessible toilets). Bright place, with high ceilings. It was unclear to us at first – going by the name – whether this was a vegan or vegetarian fair (it is vegan). We feel “Veganworld” would be a much more appropriate, clearer and better name. Veggie usually refers to vegetarianism, not veganism, so that is confusing. And using the word veggie instead of vegan makes ‘vegan’ less known and even sound more extreme (see our post: just say the word: vegan!). Admission was 8euro pp (10 euro on the day itself), which we felt was a reasonable price. Of course a free festival like …

First vegan market in Lille (France)

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A couple of weeks ago on a Sunday, there was a vegan market in Lille (Rijsel, France). Lille is just across the border with Belgium, and for us that is just an hour’s drive, so we were eager to go check it out! The vegan market was organised by Végétal & Vous, a vegan shop in Lille. We could park not too far from the Community center. A bit of a bummer that the elevator was out of order, although the organisor had mentionned and warned about this the day before on the facebook page, and offered help to anyone needing assistance.  But we managed 🙂 The market was not really that big (certainly not when compared to other vegan fairs or festivals we’ve been to, like Veggieworld, VegfestUK, vegfestNL or Vegan Summerfest). But nonetheless with a nice variety of shops, products and organisations. And since it was in France, also some new brands that we had never heard of. But also some products that I personally don’t really associate with veganism (like dream cathers and …

Lots of food, people and sunshine! Vegan Summerfest 3, Ghent

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At the end of August we went to Vegan Summerfest in Ghent, organised by Belgian organisation BE Vegan. We were also at the previous editions in 2015 and 2016. The location was the same as last year, in the Artcube, at the edge of Ghent. The day started a bit cloudy, but afterwards there was glorious sunshine in the afternoon (even left me a bit sunburnt!). It was a lovely Summer day. I made a short clip for IG from inside and outside. This was when it was still very calm, around midday. In the afternoon, the outside square was filled with people and huge lines queuing at most stalls. Again, as previous years, a huge turn out! View this post on Instagram Vegan Summerfest #ghent #bevegan #vegansofbelgium #vsf #vsf2017 #vegansummerfest A post shared by trudi_brugesvegan (@trudi_brugesvegan) on Aug 20, 2017 at 7:15am PDT A lot of familiar brands and products at the stalls, but also some new discoveries. Upon entering the hall, we immediately queued at Bakkerij Frimout, to buy about a dozen of Danish …

Vegan food at hardcore festival IEPERFEST, Ypres

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Ieperfest is a 3-day hardcore music festival, just outside Ypres (Ieper, 75km from Bruges, Belgium). Since day one, more than 20 years ago, all the food at Ieperfest is vegan! It was two years ago that we went to Ieperfest (see our blogpost here), and it was a wet edition in 2014. This time, it was a beautiful Summer weekend, and we went again one afternoon to try out the vegan goodies and enjoy the atmosphere. We tried to taste something from each foodstall, but by the end of the afternoon were too stuffed to accomplish that plan 😉 Payment for food and drinks was with tokens: we paid 66 euros for 30 tokens in total. Our plan was to start our food trip with the Flemish stew with seitan and potatoes from the Ieperfest Hardcore Foodstall, but it was announced it was only available from 5PM onwards. Bummer! So we started with a Dutch weedburger and some ‘Wish ‘n Chips’, that latter being a new ‘algae’ based dish from TDW. Nice! Here’s an overview of the food and drinks we had:   …

#55 Nice vegan dinner at De Zakkendrager in Utrecht, NL ***

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Restaurant review #55 – De Zakkendrager is a traditional style restaurant in the city center of Utrecht (The Netherlands). It is just around the corner of the music temple Tivoli/Vredenburg. We were in Utrecht a couple of weeks ago, to visit VegfestNL, a vegan festival (see our review about that here). When we looked into the possibilities for dining out in Utrecht, Dutch friends mentionned De zakkendrager, as there are several vegetarian dishes available – veganisable, and they have had a vegan dinner there before. So I inquired beforehand by e-mail whether a vegan menu was possible, and it was no problem. But, we could not make a reservation, as they only accept reservations for parties bigger than five persons. Taking our chances, we went on a Sunday evening, and arrived about 6pm. We were lucky there were still some tables available, and the restaurant soon filled up! The restaurant is located in a small alley in between the canal and the market, and was a meeting point and café for “zakkendragers” for many centuries. “Zakkendrager” means bag carrier or …

Our visit to VegfestNL in Utrecht

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Last weekend, we went to a vegan festival in the Netherlands. This was the second edition of VegfestNL, this time in Utrecht. Utrecht is only about 2 and a half hours drive from Bruges. The festival was not coincidentally on November 1, which is World Vegan Day. It was located in the Jaarbeurs of Utrecht, a big conference and event hall at the edge of the city. There is supposedly parking nearby, but when we arrived, all nearby parkings were announced as full and the surroundings seemed like a big construction site. Very confusing to get there. Luckily, we found a parking space in one of the streets not too far away, but then it was still quite a walk to the festival venue! It was not a free festival like Vegan Summer Fest a couple of weeks ago in Belgium (see our review here), but with an admission fee of 10€ (which still seems reasonably fair, although it does increase the treshold for a lot of people). There were seperate halls with dozens of stalls, selling food, …

Our visit to Vegan Summer fest in 50 photos! Belgium’s first vegan festival

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Yesterday BE Vegan hosted Belgium’s first* vegan festival in Gentbrugge. Ghentbrugge is near the city of Ghent, about 40km from Bruges, so it was only about a half hour drive for us. We decided to go early. Partly because the weather forecast warned for possible thunderstorms in the late afternoon. Also because the inscriptions on the FB event led to suggest there was going to be a huge turnout (more than 4000 people). So we wanted to avoid the ‘big crowd’ and we arrived a little bit before noon. The festival was mainly inside one of the halls of KERKGent. Inside the hall were stalls of organisations like Bite Back, Animal Rights and host organisation BE Vegan, and also several shops selling mainly shoes, books and food. In one shielded corner of the hall were some seatings for the scheduled talks (about vegan activism, vegan bussinesses etc). The big foodstalls were outside and next to that was a tent where the food demos took place.    Although we were there early, the queues for the main foodstalls outside were getting longer rapidly. We …