Revolution is a dinner party

>> >> Local vegan restaurateur neatly slices and dices her world

by NOEMI LOPINTO

If you want to get an earful of vegan philosophy, just ask Marie-Pierre Michaud what she things of genetically engineered foods. "I think these scientists are looking for power. They're neurotic, they have bad relationships with their mothers and by extension, with the planet. It's a vicious cycle of neurosis which creates a complicated human psychological fabric of violence. Sick people want to have slaves, and nature and animals are the scapegoats," says Marie-Pierre.

The 34-year-old woman grew up in Ottawa in a traditional French-Canadian family. Her mother was a nurse, her father a bureaucrat. "My mother was talking about cancer all the time. It just didn't make sense to me that we accept that cancer is a part of our lives, that chemotherapy is the solution. I started questioning the way we eat."

So Marie-Pierre became a vegan--someone who eats no animal products whatsoever. Saying no to eggs and dairy is the final step for many vegetarians, some of whom will even avoid eating honey because it is produced by bees.

"The idea is to damage nature as little as possible, to live without violence. An egg is a baby chicken, cows' milk is for calves--can there be anything more straightforward than that?" she asks.

But personal life is one thing, and saving the world another. Three years ago, Marie-Pierre took advantage of a government program which sponsors businesses to open her restaurant Les Vivres on Ste-Dominique just south of Mont-Royal. She began with just enough money for two months rent and an anarchistic vision of how a restaurant could be run. Consensus, cooperation, environmental responsibility--all the seminal hippy virtues are enshrined in the unwritten code of conduct for the "collective" that is Les Vivres.

Chick peas and cow blood

In other words, simply serving up food wasn't enough for Marie-Pierre's "vegan revolution." She also opened her restaurant to almost anyone, offering redemption through work for homeless kids, drug addicts, the mentally ill, even past sexual abusers, who found acceptance in the collective, along with their curried veggies and herbal tea.

The eclectic mix means that the atmosphere might strike some as a little bizarre. "A lot of freaks come here with their parents. Hippies seem to come from largely bourgeois families. But the parents don't usually come back, it's too rough for them here," says Marie-Pierre.

She also had some problems with the small Levitt's meat-processing factory, which until recently was located next door. "Once I went out and started screaming at them that they were poisoning people. They told me to respect their ways," Marie-Pierre says.

The animal blood, which flowed into a drain in the adjacent alley, was hardly the appropriate counterpoint for Les Vivres' hippy aura--although the grafittists who defaced an outside mural on the restaurant with the words "Hippikrits" and "Socialisme hante le monde" might approve.

But while the grungy, patchouli-scented vegan world of Marie-Pierre, dogs, children and hangers-on might not appeal to the average carnivore, she has a lot of cred in Montreal's vegetarian community.

"The vegetarian conference people called me up and said that they wanted to sell me a booth at the conference for $1,200. I said 'No way!' so they dropped it to $500. Then they offered it to me for free. They said, 'We have to have you there!,'" says Marie-Pierre. :


See Les Vivres' booth at this Sunday's vegetarianism conference at the Palais des Congrès

more news...