Mondays Plant Cafe, Best Friends Open a Vegan Restaurant
It might seem like making individual choices to save the environment or prevent global warming are futile and daunting. When so many approaches to climate change require top-down, government or industry-led solutions to the climate emergency, why do the choices of one-person matter? Why does it matter if we ride our bikes more, reduce waste, avoid single use-plastic and eat less meat when carbon and methane emissions are still being pumped into the atmosphere at alarming rates? If a whole room of people are smoking cigarettes indoors, what good does stepping outside to smoke do? Will this whole profile consist of unanswered questions?
The simple answer to all these questions (except the last one), as you may have guessed due to the title of this project, is yes it does matter. Individual, grassroots approaches to climate change matter. Marches and rallies matter. And what we eat definitely matters – perhaps the most.
There has been a ton of research done identifying a vegan, plant-based diet as the greatest impact an individual can make in reducing their carbon footprint. One of the most recent studies out of the University of Oxford, conducted and written by Joseph Poore, states that livestock provide just 18 per cent of the calories we eat globally and farming them uses 83 per cent of all farmland.
On top of that, eating is a super social activity. What we choose to order, serve, or consume in front of our friends, family and even strangers, contributes to what they eat. Studies show that our food choices also tend to converge with the people around us and that we find conforming to those people rewarding.
Poore is also quick to say that it isn’t just what you eat that reduces your impact on the environment, it's where that food comes from.
Eating a diet of only melons and mangoes while living in Canada wouldn’t only be odd, but the environmental impact of flying those items to a country where they don’t grow naturally is extremely detrimental to the environment.
If only there was a place that values these approaches to our diets and gives us the opportunity to make the individual changes we want to make. The anti-climactic reveal is that there is: Raw Eatery and Market in the Kensington neighbourhood of Calgary.
For Megan Pope and Ali Magee, the owners and operators of Raw, eating consciously isn’t just about adopting a plant-based diet. The now nearly five-year-old vegan café in the heart of the city, innocuously tucked below a florist and consignment store, may come off as merely a trendy, hip café, though it is anything but. Well, it is hip and trendy, but it is much more than that.
When Raw was opened in 2016 the menu was constructed with a near equal importance put on using local ingredients and being completely plant-based. In fact, to stress this, the Kickstarter Pope and Magee used to fund the business’s opening includes a video exploring the life of a carrot that had travelled over 10, 000 kms and been subject to 26 different pesticides. You should watch it, it really lays out the importance of local produce in a way that people like myself can understand – with lots of animation and music that makes me feel like I’m at a carnival.
For the two entrepreneurs, activists and educators (Pope offers nutrition services and they both sit on the board for VegFest in Calgary) without being conscious of both what you eat and where it comes from, you’re not making much of a difference.
“There are plenty of wrong ways to approach a vegan diet. A plant-based diet can be unethical, unhealthy and bad for the environment if not done mindfully,” says Magee.
For nearly a decade, Magee and Pope have been together as best friends and business partners. While their journey to opening Raw is seamlessly woven together, their approaches and their main ideological drivers differ slightly.
Pope is a nutritionist by trade and says a significant impetus for starting the business was the heavy reliance her education put on the traditional Canadian food guide. She questioned why we were told that this government and industry-influenced guide was so lacking and void of evidence to back its claims.
Magee, who grew up on a farm just outside of Calgary and stopped eating meat as a child, was driven much more by environmentalism, animal welfare and the devastating impact of factory farming. But Pope’s innovative and nutritional treats that she would make while the two attended university really got her thinking in terms of business opportunities.
The two speak mindfully and deliberately with exceptional knowledge on their subject though they wouldn’t consider themselves experts. They are passionate, welcoming and excellent educators.
For Pope and Magee it was classic story of any entrepreneur: move to Portugal for close to half a year, work in an eco-lodge kitchen in the Serra da Strella mountain range with the closest place being the relatively small town of Guarda, gain experience working in a vegan food truck in the Netherlands, and then move back to Canada and start a business - pretty common stuff - he said facetiously.
It was in Portugal where they really became aware of the importance of local ingredients and how much can be done with what is grown around you.
“Obviously Portugal is a little more fertile and has longer growing seasons than we do here, but when we were working there everything we used was grown in the region. The menu was constructed to reflect what was fresh. I had always valued buying local and using quality ingredients, but being there really solidified that for me,” says Pope.
The time they spent in cities like Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal where the vegan scene and community was really being fostered, opened their eyes to how important it would be to create a similar community in Calgary.
“…all these great and inspiring things were taking place in the vegan community [in other cities] and that hadn’t really started here. We wanted to be a part of that new wave,” says Magee.
The menu at Raw includes sushi made with carrots, cucumber, avocado and house made ‘salmon’ pate; a M’Egg salad made with turmeric scrambled tofu; and tacos made with sunflower seed taco ‘meat’, pico de gallo and tomato hummus; and much more.
Everything on the menu was developed based on how many local ingredients could be used. The choice to use sunflower seeds, for example, was made because they are grown domestically.
Raw is more than it presents as at face value. The walls are covered with art from local artists, it attracts a diverse, albeit hip, crowd. The owners are cool and inviting. But it is also a place that acts as a classroom for people wanting to learn how to eat plant-based in a healthy and mindful way. It is a safe place to ask questions and gain knowledge without judgement. Pope and Magee are leaders in the vegan community in Calgary and Raw Eatery & Market is at the forefront.
For more on Raw Eatery visit their website or instagram.
Written by Travis Klemp
Photographs by Dylan Leeder
