Going to the Live Organic Food Bar on Dupont
On the patio at Live Organic Food Bar sits a single East Indian woman eating some sort of vegan sushi.
Encumbered by a stern resting face, she’s locked like a laser into the world of her iPhone. Forced and slightly unnatural, she makes a point of never glancing around but lives inside her self-constructed bubble bringing small, impulsive miseries upon employees through calls or texts. After about 15 minutes her companion, hurried and apologetic for being late, arrives. The stern-faced woman is passive-aggressive, telling the new arrival that she had no choice but to go ahead and order, and then making unnecessary and pointed noises of completion with her cutlery. She then launches straight into business, a vampire sucking information from her guilty and compliant victim.
There are two waitresses serving the half dozen or so tables and both of them are lovely. One is tall and thin with a trace of brittleness to her, as if she hasn’t quite found her place in the world and might be looking for some time yet. She wears over-sized, bold glasses meant to add some complexity to the generic beauty queen image she projects—this, something she worries about, you can tell.
The other one is young and dewy, striding optimistically forward. She’s completely comfortable with who she is, and being good-natured and cheerful is not a mask she puts on when she goes to work—she wants to meet the world exactly where it stands.
An older woman, over-dressed for the weather, has the long, grey hair of a sociologist. She’s proud of it and considers it a political statement, pulling it into two practical pigtails that she fastens, one with a red band, and one with blue. She’s very particular, almost stubborn in her manner, and when she stands up to dust the crumbs off her placemat and onto the ground, it’s as if she’s beating a carpet out on a clothesline. Efficient, economical and unsentimental, she wants us to see her self-reliance, how she’s always been happy to live alone in this world. A train then trundles by, and everything shakes. Somehow, the patio then seems to dislocate and separate from time for a moment, and the world becomes a little richer, the passing aroma of electricity and oil drifting through us like history.
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So what you’re saying is vegans don’t seem like very happy people?
Siobhan:
Most of the people there seemed relatively happy and content, and I have to say, I was utterly stunned by how good the food was. Honestly, I had no idea that vegan food could actually taste good. I thought it was going to be like medicine, just with some fancy greens tossed around it to make it look pretty, but hot damn!
All the same, when you go to a place that caters to people with specific dietary wants, you’re stepping into an established culture, and sometimes one person wants to be there and the other partner in dining, doesn’t, so you can see some kind of weird dynamics transpiring. There were a couple of other tables there when I was having a drink, two of them quite happy and relaxed, and the other one a little tense, maybe even combative, with the less slutty of the two young women saying to the other–her eyes fixed like steel– “You know, you said the exact same thing to me last time we got together. The. Exact. Same. Thing.”
Funny thing about the “established culture”, I live near Evanston, a college town which is pretty much populated with people of the “long grey hair of a sociologist” ilk. It’s a definite thing. There are times when I’m at the Farmer’s Market and I feel I should apologize profusely for having dyed hair.
In downtown Toronto, I feel utterly ashamed when I tell a cashier that I’d like a plastic bag for my groceries. I just feel like I’ve let “the team” down.