Meatless, anti-capitalist & punk AF

Cook Your Own Fucking Life

Vegan Comfort Food Recipes to Feed Yourself and Build Community

by Ashley Rowe Palafox (Author)

This scrappy, can-do vegan cookbook eschews fancy ingredients and goes back to basics. It's packed with attitude and recipes anyone can cook and eat, including comfort food, smoothies, holiday staples to feed your family, and dirty rice to feed the touring band sleeping on your floor. More than just a collection of recipes, this is a DIY cultural artifact that compiles all four volumes of the original Barefoot and in the Kitchen zine and puts them in context with a new introduction—right in time for the zine's 20th anniversary. The book makes this long-out-of-print zine accessible again

SUBJECT: Punk / Food/Cooking / Zine Collection / Vegan / Microcosm Published

PUBLICATION: Nov 1, 2025

PRICE: $16.99

ISBN: 9781648413926

FORMAT: 192 pages, 5.5x8.5", paperback

WHOLESALE: $10.19

CARTON QTY: 46

ART:

Marketing Notes

According to a 2023 Gallup Consumption Habits survey, 4% of Americans are vegetarian and 1% are vegan. Another Gallup survey from 2020 found that 23% of Americans have reduced their consumption of meat
Book compiles 4 Barefoot in the Kitchen zines from 2004-2007; Mystery Science Theater-esque speech bubbles are used throughout to comment on and update elements that haven’t aged well, updating the content while preserving the original charm

Ashley Rowe Palafox, the author of the book Barefoot and in the Kitchen: Vegan Recipes for You and Cook Your Own Fucking Life: Vegan Comfort Food to Feed Yourself and Build Community, is a long-time zine-maker and comic-drawer. Ashley came to veganism via punk rock as a teenager in Los Angeles (before it was a vegan food destination) and majored in Community Studies at UC Santa Cruz before settling in Oakland, CA. Ashley co-founded and ran Fat Bottom Bakery from 2009 to 2014, and she has worked in fields from radical publishing to vegan food, and now the clinical laboratory.

A small, innovative publishing house, Microcosm Publishing specializes in work designed to make the reader feel good about being alive, take an active role in bettering their life, and impact the world around them. Microcosm has developed a reputation for teaching self-empowerment, showing hidden histories, and fostering creativity through challenging conventional publishing wisdom with books and zines about DIY skills, food, politics, and art. Our books are printed in the USA.