This is so far from popular understanding of anarchism.
They ran into the problem where one group of volunteers that aligned to cook together were vegan and insisted on making only vegan food (it also sounded like the dishes were very strange to the locals). This made sense for the cooks, but the locals didn't want the food. But nobody could convince this group to do anything differently.
Their system resulted in a sort of rotating hierarchy that meant every few days they couldn't provide for the locals.
Functional anarchy seems like it takes a lot of work.
I feel like this is more a commentary on the "needy" folks.
No one goes into a soup kitchen and expects to get their favorite meal, but I guess these folks were expecting the vegans to give up their beliefs and cook them hamburgers.
There's a strange cruelty to your comment where you're thinking of homeless people who went through a natural disaster ... so you can call them 'privileged'.
The issue is deeply cultural & until it's being worked on, solidarity is key: serving people in the ways they choose to receive care.
Imagine if the local library were destroyed, and a group came forward to organize book donations, but due to the religious beliefs of the people running the book drive, they only were willing to collect evangelical literature, and refused everything else. Would the locals in that scenario be wrong to avoid them?
Don't want to go too far down the religious hole considering where some folks have taken religion, but the whole story of Jesus washing people's feet wasn't just about his own humility / setting an example. I think it was also about treating others with some respect.
Things breaking down over veganism sounds like the typical anarchist self-own.
But if they really were short of food: I'll side with smug vegans over choosing beggars.
Some people draw that line elsewhere. I could picture someone else saying "it's ridiculous to demand meat, at least to someone who knows of the environmental and financial consequences, when perfectly good food exists that does not have the same consequences." That's putting the line elsewhere, but it's just the same line.
It's not about cooking for one's principles, it's about respecting them while offering to cook for someone else.
FDA approval of food is far more respected in our culture than Vegan approval of food is at the current time, and food means a lot more to a dining experience than just filling up a nutritional fuel tank.
They expected food that looks like a food and does not come across as disgusting to them. They did not expected hamburgers, they expected simple cheap foods that wont stress them out further.
They have choosen to go more hungry for that day.
That said, it is easy to think that some other decision making mechanism (besides the rotating decision makers these guys were practicing) would always lead to better outcomes. A common consensus mechanism is decision by majority voting. Which often works, but often just picks the suboptimal solution, because it the average of the actual close to optimal solutions different subgroups are advocating for.
Every decision making mechanisms has some failures (and advantages). It's good to know what they are.
Unfortunately there's an underlying "i do what I want" in a lot of political philosophies where it just doesn't work that way, even for getting what they want..
It's called a compromise, and it's fairly critical to a functioning group of humans of literally any size.
Not necessarily picking on your comment in particular, but it does remind me of several (what I considered at the time) broken software development methodologies that I've encountered.
Someone tells me their philosophy of development, I point out what I feel is a problematic edge case, they respond with something like the above: "well you still have to use your brain".
It seems to me that everyone's real philosophy is just being sufficiently smart and the "formal" definition is really just brought out for story time.
The ideological hate for any form of hierarchy and structure is not anarchism, it's chaos.