Please Don’t Feed the Bears

A Vegan Heavy Metal Cookbook

Written, edited, designed, and tested by Asbjorn Intonsus

Part of the DIY Yums Series

This is Microcosm #32

eBook ISBN 9781648410673

Cover by Matt Gauck

Author proceeds benefit people living with AIDS

Microcosm Publishing

2752 N Williams Ave

Portland, OR 97227

(503)799-2698

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Microcosm Publishing is Portland’s most diversified publishing house and distributor with a focus on the colorful, authentic, and empowering. Our books and zines have put your power in your hands since 1996, equipping readers to make positive changes in their lives and in the world around them. Microcosm emphasizes skill-building, showing hidden histories, and fostering creativity through challenging conventional publishing wisdom with books and bookettes about DIY skills, food, bicycling, gender, self-care, and social justice. What was once a distro and record label was started by Joe Biel in his bedroom and has become among the oldest independent publishing houses in Portland, OR. We are a politically moderate, centrist publisher in a world that has inched to the right for the past 80 years.

14

Publisher’s Note

Joe Biel

Twenty years ago, when Microcosm was still entirely located in my home, Zach Furness came from Philadelphia to Portland to interview me for a feature in Punk Planet and for his book, One Less Car.

It was a much simpler time. Zach and I both grew up culturally in punk rock so we shared a lot of shorthand, assumptions, slang, and expectations about each other. It was safe to assume that all of our friends were bicycle-riding vegans with tattoos. And mostly accurate. Cultural commodities were traded over which friends you shared, which short-lived clubhouses you’d spent the most time in, and which dumpsters contained the best treats. You’d relate over fabled rumors about these landmarks and aspirations only available through your narrow lens on the world. Zines were our idiosyncratic megaphones and our love letters to each other, shouting through broken networking cable to a series of half-functional friends with dysfunctional lives. And yet, back then it always felt like our revolution was a few inches away from actually changing the world.

The internet was still primarily only for nerds so contact information was traded like dollar bills on torn scraps of paper that you’d keep in your dirty pockets with patches holding the pants together. As Zach finished conducting the interview in my living room, it was clear that he didn’t want to leave and we had reached the portion of the afternoon for commodities trading. Fortunately, Zach thought that I was cool. Microcosm was at the height of its cultural capital. We hadn’t had enough success yet for it to rub people the wrong way or for critics to split hairs over things we had done—or allegedly done—but Microcosm was becoming a household name. I mean, hey, we were about to get an article about us in Punk Planet. Which meant that I didn’t need to prove myself. Not that I wasn’t prepared to.

“What is the zine that you really want to publish?” Zach asked.

I pontificated at length over my laundry list, monologuing about each one—the ones that got away and the people who simply couldn’t be pinned down long enough in one town to send over a master copy. I trailed off.

“What about Please Don’t Feed the Bears?” he cut me off to ask.

“Yeah, I got some copies when I was at More Than Music Fest years ago in Columbus. I sent the author postcard after postcard but I never heard back. I would love it if we could put those back in print!” I shrieked.

“He worked at a Philly record store with my friend. I can make it happen.” Zach responded.

Promising big and failing to deliver was the norm in the scene but Zach fulfilled his social obligations and responsibilities to punk the day that I received a package containing every issue of Please Don’t Feed the Bears, along with permission to do whatever I wanted with them.

I rediscovered the joy of Please Don’t Feed the Bears that day, combing through the personality and worldview in these lovable illustrations and recipes. I wrote back to the author, asking about a compilation book and he upped the ante, by suggesting that we publish a book of brand new recipes instead. It was an intimate experience and we talked about intentions and ethics, something I hadn’t yet done much as an editor at this time. Hell, he even pushed me to write my own recipe and though he rejected my actual first choice Minutemen song for not being metal enough, we compromised. Working with the author, Asbjorn, was truly a delightful experience and he soon referred to me as “more like a friend than a publisher.”

The books showed up at our door one day. And without any warning or fanfare, the author did too! He explained that he happened to be in town that day to run a marathon and after arriving, realized that our office was also located in Portland. He was dressed in black from head to toe with a beard to his belly, matching the book design that he requested.

Gradually, over years, our royalty statements turned more and more into personal conversations about our lives. It was clear that this was the part of punk that Asbjorn valued most: that we did actually become friends.

Part of becoming friends, of course, is sharing the various hardships that everyone experiences in life. But like most people who grow up in punk, we both had a disproportionate quantity and quality of hardships. Before we became friends, I never realized just how much darkness I had internalized from my upbringing and how most people haven’t lost dozens of friends to suicide before 30. But these were things that we could, unfortunately, relate about.

Hands down, my favorite, most relatable aspect of punk was always the desperation. And that is something else that we get to share. Lately, the dark periods have become less common and with longer periods between them. Still, I knew Asbjorn would understand when I passed out in late 2010 from a blood sugar crash and cracked my head open on concrete. I developed a head injury but as I healed, I came out a different person. It is not something that I can really explain to most people. I changed my fashion demonstrably and my approach to the world. I couldn’t relate with my former writings or attitudes. I took the parts of myself that I didn’t like and simply stopped being that way. Asbjorn could relate and had a similar spate of terrible of internal tragedies coincidentally around the same time.

Projects like Please Don’t Feed the Bears are our best efforts to rise above our darkest selves, to create fundamental shifts in our being. Instead of ongoing patterns of self-loathing and loudly complaining about the burden of being alive to anyone who will listen, we create the world we want to see. Which is, not coincidentally, exactly Microcosm’s mission. We rely on the kindness of friends, family, and strangers to produce projects like Please Don’t Feed the Bears. Perhaps that’s the purest part of punk, but Asbjorn and I both have trouble seeing it. Absjorn is still vegan, 25 years later, as it can be one of the few, meager ways to make our existences less miserable for others, to rise above the darkest of our years. When I failed to prod a new introduction out of Asbjorn, he explained that he no longer feels the connection to this project that he once did. It feels like something heavy from the past, before a series of major life changes; that ultimately creating this book for the world doesn’t heal inside one’s self. He prodded me for years to let the book go out of print, suggesting that no one cared anymore.

So imagine our surprise when, twenty five years after the release of the originals, it began to be discovered by another generation. The book was featured in lists of favorite vegan cookbooks and in YouTube videos from vegan metalheads from as far away as Brazil and Spain. I found myself glued to the speaker in the middle of the night, trying to decipher terrible audio and broken English from a vegan black metal podcast from somewhere in Europe about this book. It’s a rare day in hell when your effort to stay alive resonates with others and each of them picks up the torch and tells their neighborhood about it.

A kid wrote to me a few months ago, asking to republish a zine I made twenty years ago on an impulsive afternoon with a friend I haven’t seen in years. Naturally, I haven’t seen a copy of the zine in years either. And worse, I haven’t related with that writing or sentiment for even longer. But then I thought about it. I’m not going to spend hours digging through drawers to find one, but if they can find one, sure, they can publish it.

That’s the spirit of this project. The meaning has morphed and changed over many years. Experiences change your thinking even as your values stay the same. The things we’ve created mean something completely different to us than they do for the people who interact with or experience them.

And that’s why Please Don’t Feed the Bears is deeply meaningful to many people. It resonates with a time and a place and a feeling in each person’s own life, completely divorced from its intention. As I am finishing this new foreword, another pop up appears on my screen. Yet another person is suggesting Please Don’t Feed the Bears and I’m slighlty baffled. Is it a coincidence or does this mean that I’m on the right track? I decide that it doesn’t really matter. This book is for the people that love it, not the people who are indifferent or otherwise. At some point any twenty year old project isn’t about the creator anymore but the people who love it.

The world that was is a thing to cherish for many, even those who didn’t share it with us. It’s a matter of creating new memories with old things. This is a major reason that we did not attempt to fix, update, or modernize the recipes themselves in this book, but simply to frame them. The point isn’t to be perfect; it’s to be your best self. We can’t make our pasts go away, but we can change the future.

Joe Biel

Portland, OR

June 17, 2021

Introduction

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Table of Contents

Please Don't Feed the Bears

Table of Malcontents

Publisher's Note

Introduction

Notes

Soups & Sauces

Main Dishes

Side Dishes

Desserts

Drinks

Miscellaneous

Carcass

About the Author

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