Quaker Week 27th – 5th October 2025
Theme: Love Your Neighbour
Quaker Vegan Witness are inviting Quaker meetings across the UK to celebrate Quaker week by holding a bring-and-share plant-based ‘Green Feast’. This is an opportunity to joyfully share food and drink together and connect with our neighbours in our meeting and local community.
We are also inviting meetings to consider neighbours in a wider sense and to contemplate the other animals that we share the earth with and the earth itself as our neighbour. A Green Feast is a way of honouring and showing our love for all of our neighbours.
“A plant based diet is a gift to the earth, animals and climate. According to the latest science, plant-based diets have the lowest carbon footprint. Plant-based diets also help reverse biodiversity collapse by reducing agricultural land requirements for livestock and freeing it for rewilding and restoring ecosystems. Currently, livestock make up some 62% of mammals on land, with humans 34% and wildlife only 4%. Moving towards a plant-based diet is a move towards healing the Earth”
– Lindsey Fielder-Cook, Representative for the Human Impacts of Climate Change at QUNO Geneva
“We’re all on a journey to understand how the Earth crises of climate change and habitat destruction arise from our own behaviours – especially the minority of us who live in the Global North. A major part of this journey is our relationship to food. The joys of growing, cooking, and sharing food together with understanding where it comes from and how our diets contribute to the current destruction of animals and Earth, are a key part of this journey. As a vegetarian on this path, holding a plant-based Green Feast as part of Quaker Week seems like a lovely way to help me celebrate and reflect on the food that I eat and its provenance.”
– Paul Hodgkin, Living Witness
“We are one with all beings and the Earth itself; our being is bound in mutuality with all that lives. In Quaker Week let us celebrate the gift of life and our glorious universe by acknowledging that mutuality”
– Jennifer Kavanagh, Quaker and Author
“I have found being a vegan is not just a practical way to help save the Planet, but is also a source of joy and relief from the consumer machine. My wish is that during Quaker week we can share the fun of good food and love for our human, and other animal neighbours”
– Phil Laurie, Quaker Support for Climate Action (QS4CA)
“We are beings in a constant state of flux, of maintaining, refining and, if we can manage, improving the ways in which we relate to ourselves, to others and the world, and it is in that spirit of learning, growing, developing that I welcome this very timely initiative of Quaker Vegan Witness to encourage us all to explore and review one area, namely the ways, often abusive and exploitative, in which we interact with our fellow animals when they lack any means we recognise to plead their case for their right to freedom, safety, life.
I hope Quakers will, as individuals and as a community, as principled people, examine and respond proactively, to the many ways in which our culture’s attachment to the dairy and meat industries, in a time of environmentally irresponsible, corporate food production that ever increasingly cuts safety and welfare corners in the interests of profit.
Our choices profoundly affect the wellbeing and destinies not only of the trillions of animals we endlessly imprison, exploit and slaughter, but ultimately of ourselves. As people of peace I hope we will deepen our understanding of how an unnecessary dependence on the industrial exploitation of animals is threatening Earth’s biosphere, our planet’s life support system, harvests, food production , social stability and world peace”
– Rajan Naidu, Climate and Peace, Selly Oak Meeting
Getting Involved
If you would like to take part, simply organise a Green Feast potluck for your meeting (bring and share). Encourage everyone to bring only plant-based food as a way of honouring all animals as neighbours.
If you are not used to preparing plant-based food, consider all the food that you already eat that is plant-based: rice, pasta, potatoes, lentils, vegetables, salads etc. Often, the only small shift needed is swapping out an ingredient or two for another that serves a similar purpose – such as olive oil instead of butter. Experimenting with recipes online that help you turn your favourite food into a plant-based version can be lots of fun!
The Central England Quakers website has a great online booklet with climate friendly plant-based recipes.
Tea and biscuits after a meeting can easily be plant-based with very little fuss: plant-based milks are often preferred to milk from cows: soya milk is great with tea, and a ‘barista’ oat milk works very well with coffee. As for the fantastic range of accidentally plant-based biscuits there is a huge range: our favourites are bourbons and hobnobs! (and Lidl’s range of biscuits are nearly all plant-based, labelled clearly and very inexpensive).
Finally, we would love you to share your experiences and photos from your Green Feast. Please get in touch so we can celebrate together. If you would like advice on how to go about arranging your Green Feast, we would be delighted to hear from you.
Resources
Feel free to download and print posters for your meeting. There is also a poster where you can write the details of your own Green Feast.
