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Vegan and vegetarian

To avoid the unecessary cruel chains of violence associated with the dairy industry, where millions of cows are slaughtered daily, Bhakti Lounge has been following a vegan diet for the past 2 years enabling karma free food to be served.

Thanks to the hard work and dedication of two families based in Wellington and in Auckland, Bhakti Lounge is happy to now be serving the occasional preparations made with milk from our very own protected cows. The cows will live out the full duration of their lives and are well loved and cared for.

Vegan options are still available so please let the serve out team know your dietary requirements :)

What is good food?
We believe that good food should be:

Healthy & tasty food: local, fresh, well-spiced, skillfully cooked
Anyone who has been to Bhakti Lounge can tell you: the food is amazing – healthy & tasty. “How do you do it?” people ask.

We create as much of our meals from whole foods as possible and aim to become free from processed foods. That is, for example: we bake our own bread, cook our own beans, chop our own tomatoes, knead our own pastries and make our own chutneys and sauces.

At Bhakti Lounge we have a great selection of spices. We use them all (though not all at once, of course) to enhance the flavour of each meal. The ideal spicing creates tastes that are out of this world.

The chefs at Bhakti Lounge are constantly trying to improve the cooking. Whether we are poring over our huge collection of cookbooks in search of the perfect recipe, learning cooking techniques from each other, or experimenting with different preparations in our free time: we never stop trying to improve the food.

All the cooks at Bhakti Lounge are fully qualified, both materially (in terms of skill) and spiritually (in terms of consciousness). Additionally, just like all staff at Bhakti Lounge, the cooks are volunteers. They do not accept payment for their services.

Learning the yoga of cooking is no easy task. It is a long process that requires intelligence, discipline, determination and purification. We welcome anyone who is willing to take up the challenge and will train them in the yoga of cooking.

Eco-food: local, seasonal and meat-free
Bhakti Lounge aims to be as ecologically sound as possible. The food we serve plays a major role in our sustainability strategy.

The meat-free food at Bhakti Lounge helps the environment. A vegetarian diet does more to reduce global warming than driving a super-fuel efficient hybrid car: vegetarianism is the new Prius. The United Nations climate change chief agrees.

Additionally, the vegan and vegetarian food we serve is healthier than a meat-based diet. In fact research shows that eating a plant based diet may indeed reduce your cancer risk (e.g. colon cancer and breast cancer).

It is also better economics. It is far more cost efficient to grow food and directly feed it to humans, than to grow food to feed animals, then kill the animals and feed them to humans.

And finally, the macro-economic crisis of the rising cost of food can be mitigated by a meat-free diet. Therefore Bhakti Lounge is, always has been, and always will be meat-free.

Non-violent food:
That means no meat, no fish, no eggs, no dairy products from unprotected cows, and no animal derived ingredients (e.g. avoiding non-vegetarian e-numbers).

Prasadam: food for the soul
The consciousness of the cook affects the eater. Nothing beats the taste of food prepared and served in a loving mood. That is why we spiritualize all food cooked at Bhakti Lounge.

Prasadam, or spiritual food, is food that has been cooked with love and devotion and offered to the supreme origin of all consciousness. The high consciousness imbibed into that food can be directly tasted by the eater. That is the secret ingredient that makes the food at Bhakti Lounge taste uniquely unlike any other.

Imagine a cruel, mind-numbing factory where food is mass-produced. The workers in the factory are saturating the food with their anger, frustration and profanities. The consciousness of anyone who eats such food is contaminated with the same bad qualities.

By contrast, the blessed food at Bhakti Lounge improves the consciousness of the eater. It is the true happy meal.

Another aspect of prasadam is that it is cooked and offered in a mood of gratitude. We live by the grace of the earth and so we also thank her for providing us with the food we eat. We do not wish to selfishly steal the earth’s resources. So, we offer a portion of the food back to the Ultimate Source; this automatically gives thanks to the earth for her sacrifice. Just like watering the tree at the root nourishes all the branches. An added side-effect of this is that it also removes any bad karma resultant from the killing of the plants we eat. The food at Bhakti Lounge is therefore certified “karma-free”.

So by all means, please enjoy the karma-free, blessed, happy food known as prasadam at Bhakti Lounge. If beyond that you want to learn to prepare such food yourself, we welcome you to attend our regular vegan cooking classes (check here for upcoming sessions).