Veganizing Taos
Not political, just delicious
Foodies shouldn’t have to worry if their delights are vegan or not, so why not just make delicious food vegan, thus protecting the health of all animals and the planet? A win-win for all beings and a super plus for Mother Nature.
So say Noah Pettus and Brittany Garner, chefs and owners of The Wake & Take vegan restaurant in Arroyo Seco.
Many Taos Farmers Market folk remember Pettus and Garner’s Shrublife – Plant-Based Provisions at the farmers market where they sold cravable “fast-food vegan” products, most notably their homemade sei tan.
In 2018 they decided to set up shop next door to their former restaurant, Aceq, where they had established themselves with loyal clientele for a number of years before selling it to super popular chef/sommelier Michael “Red” Wagener.
“We use oat bread, and we’re all-oat milk in-house,” Pettus said. “We have coconut creamer for cafés. Everything is market fresh and a lot of local ingredients, seasonally as weather permits. It’s all very vegetable-based. All our grains are organic – organic quinoa, local anasazi beans from the southern Colorado-Four Corners area. We make out own meat alternative.”
The most popular of their farmers market products was their fried ‘chiken’ sei tan, their specialty. “We are waiting until we have more time and space to do a big batch and run it for a week or so.”
He said they like to put it up on social media when it’s available, (@theWake&Take instagram and Facebook).
Some of their most popular treats are The Wake & Take Burrito,
The Wake & Take Odin, their Oracle and fabulous juices. This is a one creative, breakfast-lunchie sort of spot.
“We’re just primarily focused on the café now,” Pettus said. “We used to make beet sausage and quinoa anasazi bean patties. Now we serve more breakfast/lunch superfood bowls, more savory lunch bowls. Our most popular item is the breakfast burrito, with our housemate potatoes.” How an why they changed was basically Garner’s influence. “Brittany led the way with a plant-based diet change, partly due to health sensitivities, but also for spiritual purposes,” Pettus said. “Once the door opened for us on veganism it was an easy decision for a number of reasons. For me it was a health and wellness through diet as well as an environmental choice. We both learned so much on the subject and it became clear that our current food system and diet as a society was unsustainable and broken.”
“More people are turning to veganism – we feel a lot of people are – so we saw we could serve that group,” Pettus said about their decision to open a brick-and-mortar vegan spot.
“We definitely have regulars who are plant-based,” he continued. “Most aren’t though, and that’s fine too. They make it a part of their diet one or two times a week and we’re here to give them what they want.”
Even being vegan for one day works, according to numerous “green” and vegan websites – vegans save 600-1,000 gallons of water per day.
Water use for a strictly vegan diet is estimated at 2,271 liters (or 600 gallons) less per day than needed to produce cow’s milk – “628 litres of water for every litre of dairy, compared to 371 for almond, 270 for rice, 48 for oat and 28 for soy milk” (National Geographic: truthordrought.com/water).
And that doesn’t count the land use. Dairy “generally requires nine times more land than any of the plant-based alternatives. Every litre of cow’s milk uses 8.9 square metres per year, compared to 0.8