Well we are doing less walking now and more vegan food giveaways.  We are only doing between 5-10km a day on this part of the route, as Pacific Highway was deemed to dangerous and Nige (support driver); as planned; has headed off to work on other projects.  We will pick up the pace again when we reach Ballina, for those final two weeks we will do about 30km a day, yeah.

So in the last few days we have done food giveaways at the Central Coast, Newcastle and Taree.  Suki and I have been amazed at how easy this can be, yet so effective.  One does not need much time or money to have an incredible impact.

On the Central Coast and Newcastle we handed out at each place 40 half hamburgers as well as vegan coconut ice, LEDA nurture bars and Plamil chocolate pieces, as well as hundreds of leaflets on describing the conditions of factory farming and the benefits of adopting a vegan diet.  We were on a couple of local radio stations on the Central Coast and on NBN News in Newcastle.  So what makes it easy and cheap?

Here’s what we do.  We have hired a Wicked camper van to ensure that we always have a gas cooker if needed, and we have a gas refrigerator in the car.  But we never have needed to use so far.  Most of the produce has been donated, by Vegan Perfection, Bounty Burgers, LEDA and Rawganic chocolate in this case.  For the hamburgers we asked Bakers delight if they would donate the rolls, as they have in most locations we have been to.  Yes as usual.  The local organic produce store donated lettuce and the tomatoes.  We bought tomato sauce and mustard.  We then ask local restaurants if we can prepare in their kitchen so we can do it as close to possible as our giveaway location.  Oh and by the way we ask for all of this when we arrive in the city, the afternoon before or morning of the giveaway.  And to be honest, you could easily buy all of this for about $30 a go, which is pretty cool.

In Taree we resumed giving out hotdogs again.  Thanks to University of New England for allowing use of your kitchen – and I hope you are just as kind to me in my chemistry exam this Friday haha (For those of you who are not aware, I am studying a Diploma in Agriculture Majoring in Animal Production Systems, what you do when you want to be a factory farmer).

My favourite comment of the day was “Seriously they are not meat?  Wow, they are good”.  Awesome!  We stayed for about an hour, we chatted to people, handed out food and danced around and attracted attention in our pig and cow suit.  Brendan joined us for the day and will be meeting back up with us at Ballina.  Kids love us of course and Wayne tried his best to trip me over in the pig suit, his way of protesting at wearing a lead and collar :)

We encourage others to try doing food giveaways, what better way to spread the message of kindness to animals, appeal straight to people’s taste buds and stomachs!