This post is by our editor Dr. Alex Ketchum. It centres on the British feminist cookbook, How Many Beans Make Pulse: Trade Secrets. It is part of her research on feminist cookbooks. For more of her work, see The Feminist Restaurant Project and check out her bookette "How to Start a Feminist Restaurant" (Microcosm 2018).
The Pulse Collective of Brighton, England’s cookbook How Many Beans Make Pulse: Trade Secrets (c.1978) is a short cookbook, yet it is rich in material. The founders of Pulse described their restaurant as a wholefood vegetarian restaurant run collectively by eight women: Ruth Allaun, Eugenia Kis, Alison Hammer, Sarah Woodruff, Sally Horne, Isobel Golt, Elaine Gardner, Val Miles, and Debbie Trethway. Located in Falmer House in the students’ union building at Sussex University in Brighton, England, they were open from 12:30 to 2:30 pm on weekdays during term time. While the collective expressed the desire to open a location in town, the greater capital needed relative to the “reasonably cheap rent” and regular customer base of the student resource centre made such a move impossible. Their cookbook How Many Beans Make Pulse, produced by Diana Ceresa and Erin McGraw, with photos by collective member, Sally Horne, argues that they were able to create a feminist community built around food. The Pulse Collective used their cookbook to not only share recipes but also act as a political document in which they could express their goals: “as a group, we share a number of aims and ideas, which we would like to express here. These seem to fall into three main sections; namely food, feminism and work structure (not necessarily in that order)” (c.1978: 1).
The forty-page, self-published cookbook has a simple layout. A two-page introduction thoroughly explains how the cookbook’s authors understood the connection between food, environmentalism, feminism, and labour practices. The authors organized the recipes by dish types: basics, soups, pies and casseroles, side dishes, salads, puddings and cakes. The basics are truly basic, explaining how to cook rice, make pastry dough, and mayonnaise. All recipes served four to six people; the writers of the cookbook scaled down the restaurant’s own recipes. Pulse’s recipes were reminiscent of earlier 1970s vegetarian fare with seemingly bland dishes, which included their lettuce soup, oatcake with fruit topping, and kale crumble. The selection of soups included a potato soup with mint, borscht, and the unappealing-sounding lettuce soup made with lettuce, onion, lemon, punnet cress, mint, oil, garlic tamari, vegetable stock, tamari, salt and pepper, and the option of adding yogurt or sour cream, served cold. One side dish recipe is for cheese mayonnaise with green pepper. Desserts include a Guinness Cake and the Fruitarian Christmas Pudding. Photos spread throughout the cookbook do not show the dishes, but rather portray the working conditions of the Pulse Collective. Photographs of the tasks of going to the market, preparing the food, serving, and cleaning accompany the recipes. The Pulse Collective used photographs to place the workers at the forefront rather than the food, emphasizing feminism and labour’s interconnectedness. By showing how the Pulse collective members incorporated their politics in all aspects of the food production process and throughout their days, politics became less threatening. Enacting a feminist vegetarian politics, as the Pulse collective demonstrated through their recipes, frontmatter, and photographs, could be enacted through small everyday changes.
The Pulse Collective spent much of the introduction of their cookbook explaining what the work days at the restaurant consisted of: how many hours each person worked, buying ingredients, cooking preparations, serving, cleaning, and organizing. In this description, the writers emphasized that their restaurant and thus cookbook was different because “in contrast to most restaurants there are no specialists in our kitchen, in that we all take turns to do all the jobs and share responsibility for remembering all the endless little tasks which ensure that the serving of lunch goes smoothly” (c.1978: 1-2). Feminist organizations were not the only ones to organize as collectives. Non-hierarchical and collective structures existed in other countercultural and activist organizations. However, Pulse saw their collective as unique due to its women-only dynamic. The authors noted that “some of us who later joined Pulse, came because we were tired of the sexism hassles associated with working with men. We feel that the emotional and practical support we give each other, a direct result of being all women, is more valuable” (c.1978: 2). Spending a significant portion of the cookbook introduction explaining workplace practices was key to the way that the collective politically linked food, feminism, and labor practices.
The Pulse Collective emphasized the role feminism played in their work and the relationship to food and environmentalism. The women of Pulse explained, “Our policy of being a woman-only cooperative is important both personally and politically” (c.1978: 1). The four women who started Pulse decide to exclude men for several reasons. All four were involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement and felt that in view of the scarcity of all-women work situations it would be constructive to create one, writing that “being in a society where women are rarely in positions of responsibility at work, we wanted to create a situation where we would have control over what we do, make decisions and take responsibility” (c.1978: 2). They also saw their existence as a political statement to the general public as “people expect to find a man running the show, doing the buying, keeping the accounts. It’s good for the municipal market workers to see women buying for their own business. It’s good for people asking to see our male manager to be told that we are all women and work collectively” (c.1978: 2). The members were involved with feminist political work outside of the restaurant and brought those ideas back into the restaurant setting and in their cookbook as well. By depicting the way the members actually lived out their politics in its cookbook, the Pulse Collective provided its readers with a recipe to change their daily lives and enact feminist vegetarian values.
The Pulse Collective emphasized the importance of the vegetarian ingredients that they used in their restaurants and why home cooks using their cookbooks should follow suit. At Pulse, the writers noted that “it matters to us where we buy our supplies, in that when it is possible we would rather support small cooperative groups than large monopolies. We buy our bread, herbs and spices from Simple Supplies (George Street) and pulses, grains, honey and peanut butter etc. from Infinity (North Road)” (c.1978: 1). The collective members noted that even though they were “stuck with the Municipal Market” for vegetables, they hoped that organic smallholdings would one day supply their restaurants as “it would be good to be part of a cooperative network and to have more control over the quality of the food we buy” (c.1978). By making these limitations known the collective showed readers that enacting one’s own politics was a process, making transformation appear less radical and more palatable, and perhaps more possible.
Vegetarian cooking was integral to the Pulse Collective’s feminism and environmentalism. While not every member of the Pulse Collective was a strict vegetarian in her daily life, the collective wrote “we believe that a vegetarian, wholefood diet is important for health, political, and ecological reasons” (c.1978:1). They further noted that “animals bred for food suffer bad conditions, are given drugs, and are fed soya beans. Land and food resources could be reallocated to provide more and better quality food for more people” (c.1978: 1). The authors continued, noting, “Our food is vegetarian because we are feminists. We are opposed to the exploitation, domination, and destruction, which come from factory farming and the hunter with the gun. We oppose the keeping and killing of animals for the pleasure of the palate just as we oppose men controlling abortion or sterilization. We won’t be part of the torture and killing of animals” (1980:xi). The authors used the cookbook to show that cooking with vegetarian ingredients and cooking in a more ethical way was possible. While, the Pulse Collective was more interested in providing information on physical nourishment, the authors did share their own brain food. In a footnote, the authors wrote that Elizabeth Fisher’s work on the connections between the oppression of animals and women and philosopher Peter Singer’s work on ethical vegetarianism inspired them.
The Pulse Collectives’ cookbook merged the politics of food, feminism, labor, and environmentalism while demonstrating the value of cooking. As the members of Pulse wrote, “While we are aware that what we are doing is traditionally held to be women’s work, i.e. cooking, we hope that the way in which we organize and present ourselves is a practical demonstration of how women working together can create for themselves a really alternative working situation” (c.1978: 2). The feminist, women-only collective Pulse used food as a way to create community, advocate for labor rights, and promote environmentalism. The collective used cookbooks, a genre historically dominated by women authors, in order to share recipes for change (literally 50 pence in the case of How Many Beans Make Pulse!).
(NB: While British countercultural environmental, vegetarian, hippie, and feminist movements were unique to their national context, the American influence on British hippie and natural food movements has been noted by numerous scholars (Horne 1982 and Marwick 2011). The Pulse Collective’s cookbook How Many Beans Make Pulse: Trade Secrets, while local to the Brighton context, speaks to a transnational feminist vegetarian cooking discourse, in that this conversation happened in both countries and the literature circulated between the two. Furthermore, the Pulse cookbook reached American audiences through the pages of periodical, Undercurrents’ 1978 special issue on women and energy (12-13), which informed readers about the motivation the collective had for creating their feminist vegetarian restaurant and cookbook. The article also told readers where to purchase copies.)