THE VEGAN BUS

The Vegan Bus on the way to Burning Man 2007.

The Vegan Bus on the way to Burning Man 2007.

The Vegan Bus Project

The Vegan Bus was a project Inspired by my 2006 trip to Burning Man. The culture and gift economy of the wild desert festival, combined with my enthusiasm for spreading the vegan message artistically, resulted in the Vegan Bus.

I organized a group of activists to raise money and buy a full-sized school bus and convert it to run on WVO (Waste Vegetable Oil). Our newborn bus successfully navigated an improbable voyage from Northampton, MA to Black Rock City in Nevada, what the Burning Man website calls “a temporary metropolis dedicated to community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance.”

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The Veggie Oil Conversion

The Vegan Bus was converted to run on Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO), which we collected from restaurants and filtered to run through the engine.

Read how we converted our bus to run on Waste Vegetable Oil

The Vegan Bus Blog Highlights

The Vegan Bus Meets the Supreme Master

In cyberspace there exists a video about the Vegan Bus by Supreme Master TV, and it’s making was a surreal adventure. We had to invent an activity on the weekend they wanted to film us, so we went to the Ashfield Fall Festival in western Massachusetts. The bus was already decorated for Halloween, so we wore costumes to make things a little more theatrical. We made vegan donuts the night before, and handed them out along with our vegan propaganda pamphlets.

A few months later, to celebrate the completed video, we were invited to the Supreme Master’s Loving Hut restaurant in Worcester, MA, a little over an hour east of our home base in Northampton. We got there running grease, and when we walked in the room was full of mostly Asian people clapping and smiling at us as if we were vegan royalty. They presented us with a giant cake that had a drawing of the bus on it. We were ready to chow it down when we were told it was for us to take home, they had another one for us already cut into pieces.

What a long strange trip it’s been.

THE VEGAN BUS BLOG ARCHIVE