A taco from new Kensington Market vegan joint Hot Beans (Ed Wilkinson-Latham). It’s a drizzly, unseasonably cool June day and 918 Bathurst is, to use an entirely inappropriate analogy, a zoo. Today, the community arts centre in the Annex is home to Toronto’s first raw and vegan food festival, and the multi-level space is crammed with booths selling all manner of healthy, organic, animal product-free foods, cosmetics and services. The vibe is, not surprisingly, a bit hippy-dippy, and quite a lot touchy-feely, but the crowd is pleasingly diverse – everyone from soccer moms to scarification aficionados – and seems a bit overwhelmed both by how much stuff there is and how many people are here to buy, or at least inquire about, this stuff. Over the course of the day, approximately three thousand people, in fact, roam through the rooms, filling tote bags with matcha tea, organic sprouts, gluten-free granola, wheatgrass juicers, devices designed to protect you from electromagnetic waves, therapeutic mud. There are talks with titles like “The Goodness of Algae” or “Super-Immunity with Essential Oils.” Vegandie, a “vegan lifestyle personal trainer,” gives away free homemade protein shakes. In one room, you can get a five-minute massage or a tattoo with organic, vegan ink (a sign promises “no bleeding,” “no scabbing”). Several of the people manning the booths are attractive, bright-eyed young women, and roughly 60 per cent of the festival’s attendees could be similarly described. On the stage in the centre of the complex, half a dozen men and women from House of Yoga practice sun salutations, accompanied by a DJ named Big Jimmy whose laptop produces a soothing, ambient hum. In the basement, a very busy, tanned, middle-aged man drills holes into fresh, green coconuts, and pops straws into the holes. As I line up to buy a tub of assorted vegetables and buckwheat – a surprisingly appetizing lunch served by a tall Russian woman and her two young children, all of them dressed in white – I overhear a cheery 65-year-old woman from Sudbury rhyming off the growing number of raw food restaurants in the GTA. “There’s Nzyme in Oakville,” Linda says, stabbing a piece of kim chee,“and then there’s Raw Aura in Mississauga.” She’s been eating raw for three years, she tells me. Her son, John, who suffers from a rare eye condition that’s left him with extremely limited vision, has been vegan for 15 years, for health and ethical reasons. Linda’s reasons are a bit more prosaic: “I like eating, and it just tastes better!” For 20 years, I was a “vegetarian” who occasionally ate seafood. A year-and-a-half ago, I cut out fish (the “bushmeat of the sea,” I read somewhere, describing the horrifying depletion of worldwide fish stocks). Three months ago, aside from a couple of brunch-time lapses and a rather challenging trip to Paris, I stopped eating animal products entirely. The reasons are simple and, arguably, sentimental: my affection for animals, and my desire to limit their suffering, far outweighs my desire to eat them. But as the late novelist Brigid Brophy put it, “Whenever people say ‘We musn’t be sentimental,’ you can take it they are about to do something cruel.” The blithe consumption of factory-farmed animal products (approximately 99 per cent of all animal products come out of factory farms) requires, to my mind, a considerable (if unacknowledged) capacity for cruelty and complicity in relentless, grotesque, undeniable misery – not to mention a casual disdain for the environmental crises that eating meat helps to perpetuate. (Here’s just one damning statistic: the global livestock industry is responsible for nearly 20 per cent of humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions; more than all the cars, trains, ships, and planes combined.) As Gary Francione, a leading proponent of animal rights, puts it, “We do not need any animal products for health purposes, and animal agriculture is an ecological disaster. The best justification that we have for killing billions of animals every year is that they taste good. That simply cannot suffice as a moral justification.” I agree. And, since Torontonians live in a progressive, cosmopolitan, affluent city, with a historically unprecedented amount of choice in, and knowledge of, what we consume, that justification seems increasingly insufficient. “We’re very lucky in Toronto,” says David Alexander, Executive Director of the Toronto Vegetarian Association, who himself has been vegan for a year, and vegetarian for six years before that. “A great number of vegan businesses exist and it’s easy to find people who’ve made the same choice.” Alexander argues that while only three to five per cent of the North American population is estimated to be vegetarian, the availability and diversity of meatless meals in both restaurants and grocery stores has “blown up” in the past ten years. TVA’s own annual food fair attracts 20,00o people every year over the course of three days. And more and more, those people are eschewing animal products of all kinds – if 15 years ago, the norm at the fair was vegetarian, it’s now vegan. Veganism is enjoying a kind of vogue among celebrities – everyone from Oprah to Jonathan Safran Foer to Mike Tyson (save the ear-gnawing jokes) have adopted the lifestyle – and the trickle down to the gen pop has been steady. It wasn’t so long ago that being vegan in Toronto meant doing all your own cooking (with special occasions at the vaguely dispiriting dining rooms of Commensal and Buddha’s Vegetarian), and while Hogtown’s still no Portland, the unofficial worldwide capital of vegan cuisine, we are slowly catching up. Our much-touted multiculturalism means a dizzying array of cuisines – particularly South Asian and Middle Eastern, both of which traditionally contain abundant veggie dishes – are available across the GTA, and, in the last year alone, a number of explicitly vegan eateries have opened up in and around downtown. In the Junction, Bunner’s Bakery produces deceivingly decadent vegan and gluten-free cupcakes, muffins and cookies, and across the street, Rawlicious offers what they call “clear-conscience eating” and a menu of similarly gluten-free juices, salads, wraps, sprouted buckwheat crust pizza and several desserts. (They also have a location in Yorkville.) Urban Herbivore, which recently opened a second caf in the Octopus Garden yoga studio, sells enormous grain bowls, sandwiches and salads (eating there, surrounded by barefoot, Lululemon-clad yoginis, you feel like you’ve been invited to a particularly health-conscious slumber party). A trio of former Urban Herbivore employees opened the Hot Beans vegan burrito joint late last February. Recognizing that Toronto had a number of vegan restaurants geared largely towards healthy eating – Fresh, Fressen, Live, etc. – the owners wanted to offer something closer to vegan fast food. “We opened a place we wished existed,” says co-owner Madeleine Foote, and Hot Beans, it turns out, is a place that many people must have wished existed – the small outpost in Kensington Market, while specializing in take-out, is often packed with diners gobbling down jackfruit tacos covered in cashew cream or seitan burritos slathered in homemade peanut sauce. A single fresh donut, which comes in lime-coconut, Boston Cream, or espresso chocolate, will cost you more than a whole box of Timbits, but is entirely worth it. Just about every mainstream article about vegetarian restaurants talks about food in mildly apologetic, oh-but-it-really-does-taste-good-you-won’t-even-miss-the-meat terms, and I’m trying to avoid that here, but, man, the food is really good – succulent, complex, comforting – and, seriously, you won’t miss the meat (or the dairy, or the eggs, or the lard). In July, Hot Beans’ much-anticipated sister spot, The Hogtown Vegan, opens near Christie Pits. A growing number of cafs and restaurants also stud their menus with various vegan options – E.L. Ruddy Co. on Dundas West, comes to mind, as does Cardinal Rule on Roncesvalles – and with veggie-friendly Freshii and Sandwich Box outlets becoming almost as ubiquitous as Starbucks franchises, the tedious excuses for not giving up meat – it’s difficult, it’s unpleasant, it’s inconvenient, I can’t live without bacon – seem increasingly hollow. If we’re lucky, the unpleasant foodie phrase “nose-to-tail” might soon be replaced with the more enlightened “leaf-to-root.” As celebrated chef and food writer Mark Bittman, who has famously adopted a vegan-before-6-p.m. diet, says, “Whenever you eat beans instead of animal products, everyone wins.”
