Eat When You're Hungry, Babe
When you’re vegan and you’re in a rush, what options do you have for a quick lunch? Tina Barton, owner of Hungry Babe, had been thinking about this for a long time. She’d worked in retail, she’d been a student and she knew how hard it was to find vegan takeaway lunches with only 15 minutes or so to spare.
The choices available to her typically fell into two categories: decadent or demoralizing.
“It’s either like a big vegan fried ‘chicken’ platter with vegan gravy and vegan cheese sauce — certainly more than I have time and appetite to eat on my lunch break. Or it’s like, ‘Drink this smoothie because you hate yourself,’” Barton says.
“And I really wanted to make something that was kind of in the middle. Something that was regular, everyday food.”
Seeing a gap in the market, Barton thought about starting her own brand while working as the manager of the small health food store, Herb & Spice, in Ottawa’s Centretown.
“I’ve always loved to cook. And so a coworker of mine [...] said, ‘Well, if you think you want to give it a try, just give it a try. See where it goes.”
And so Hungry Babe was born. It started with a small, soft launch of takeaway meals in the summer of 2018. Inspired by all the positive feedback she received, Barton started to make plans to take on Hungry Babe full time. She moved into a professional kitchen space, which she now shares with Michael’s Dolce and Top Shelf Preserves.
“They were both super supportive and it was really great to see two business owners at a further stage who had left their day jobs and pursued small batch food in their own time as well,” she says.
At the end of 2019, she left her job and went on a vacation to celebrate the next chapter of her life.
Then COVID hit.
It was a difficult time to make the choice to go out on her own, but she went for it. And it turned into an opportunity to hear from people about what they really needed when their regular meal routine was totally thrown off kilter.
“So many people were faced with preparing their own lunch for the first time in many years. A lot of people reached out to me who had kids at home who normally got cafeteria service, or they usually had lunch provided at their office, or they work downtown and they just pop out and grab something. And for the first time, they were like, ‘Everyone in my house is asking me for lunch and I don’t know what to feed these people, including myself,’” she says.
She started doing home delivery and a salad subscription service to help people find a routine again. And when the Parkdale Night Market started in 2021, she set up a stand and got to talk to more people about what they were looking for in a fun lunch.
Some clients became regulars, ordering five salads each week. Some just order when they’re going through a busy time and aren’t able to do any meal prep. Either way, Barton is happy to help people eat when they’re hungry.
“I hope that getting a lunch service like mine doesn’t feel like a luxury. It just feels like something you deserve. And you deserve to eat a good lunch and eat when you’re hungry, babe,” she says.
“Eat when you’re hungry, babe” has always been a very “grounding phrase” for Barton, who explains that she has a history of disordered eating and for a lot of her life, she didn’t eat when she was hungry.
“It’s the case for me, and I’m sure it’s the case for a lot of people, where if I don’t feel like I have time and there’s nothing convenient and tasty to reach for, I’ll just skip it,” she says.
“There’s things in my personal history that are relevant to that, like problems with food and eating, but I think even if you don’t have that history, it’s so easy to just be like, ‘Oh, I don’t have time today’ or it’s 3 p.m. and you’re like, ‘Oh, I only had coffee today and nothing else.’ There needs to be a solution for that.”
So, ever since Barton started her brand, she wanted to use her platform to share her message and “make joy in food.”
“When your body is telling you that you are hungry, it is time to stop and have a break and eat some food. It is not optional. Your body is telling you you’re hungry for a reason. Those are all my values. And I think that one of the things that’s so special about small business is you can make your values part of your company values.”
Early on in the pandemic, Barton saw how her prepared meals helped people adjust to big changes in their routines. As we head into this fall, COVID-19 is still affecting our everyday lives, including how we eat.
With some folks going back to the office and kids heading toschool, it’s a hectic and challenging time for meal planning. For anyone feeling stressed about this, Barton’s advice is simple: don’t feel bad for doing what’s convenient for you.
“At the end of the day, you have to feed yourselves,” she says, “You really have to just do whatever you can to make that as easy on yourself as possible.”
As an example, she talks about her best-selling salad with perogies on top: “That’s something that I make for myself all the time. I keep perogies in the freezer and it takes four seconds to fry them up, and suddenly your meal feels a little more friendly, a little more exciting. At one time in my life, I would have been like, ‘Oh, I should make perogies from scratch. It would be so much better.’ [Well,] yes, they would. But I would never do that. And I would never bother to make that for myself for lunch on a busy day.”
This fall, Barton is looking for ways to provide more takeout options that make last-minute orders a bit easier. Typically, she has about eight to 10 salads on a rotating menu, and, in the winter, she offers some vegan warm-up meals such as mac ’n’ cheese, shepherd’s pie and cauliflower curry. When the holidays roll around, she likes to prepare seasonal meals for those who want to make sure Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner are just as delicious for the vegans in their lives.
“Sometimes people [just say,] ‘There’s one person here who isn’t going to eat the main thing that we’re having and we just want them to have something nice and special that’s not too challenging to throw together,’” she says. “I certainly remember going to a lot of family holidays and having to make from scratch something different for myself to eat or else eat one sad Brussels sprout.”
If you are preparing your own salad at home, there are some things you can do to take it to the next level, such as including brown rice or quinoa to make it a more complete meal. Barton likes using kale because it doesn’t get soggy as quickly as other greens. A little crunch like cabbage can also go a long way. But the real secret to a great salad? Remember, it’s “not a punishment.”
“Salad is not how you signal to yourself that you’re ‘being good’ [about your food habits]. It’s just a delicious, cold, crunchy, portable, filling meal that anyone can enjoy.”
Hungry Babe
hungrybabe.ca | @hungrybabe
