As many of you may have heard, the Holy Cow Café had been embroiled in a controversy concerning the renewal of its lease at the food court of the U of O’s Erb Memorial Union. A few months ago, a committee representing the EMU decided not to renew the Holy Cow’s lease and to offer the space to The Laughing Planet Café instead. It angered many that neither customers nor the Holy Cow were informed or involved in the decision making process, and many others were upset to lose a café that, in its 10 years of tenure, had become a local icon for sustainable, organic business practices and tasty vegetarian food.
I don’t know all of the details of what happened, I am just thankful that public support and legal pressure have prevailed and that the Holy Cow can keep cranking out its famous Pad Thais. I have been working for the Holy Cow Café since September. As a literature student, I needed a job close to the library with a student-friendly schedule. Now I prepare and serve food at lunchtime and wash dishes in the afternoons. It’s not a glorious job, but there is something special about it that has to do with connectivity
We are all caught in networks of exchange of some kind, but rare and golden are those that reward you with a smiling conscience whenever you become aware of them. When the little reminders of these connections hit me in stressful lunch-rush moments, as they inevitably do, then a smile softens my face that comes from the recognition that I, too, have an important role to play in this web – that my daily repetitive motions help keep this good thing truckin’ along. It may sound sappy, but I am convinced that a little bit of that smile finds its way into the Pad Thais and Sag Paneers I serve.
I don’t know the legalities or politics of the EMU bidding or lease-space allocation process or all that went down. I imagine these had a lot to do with numbers and quantifiable things. That is not how I work. How, after all, do you quantify networks of “good vibrations?” Perhaps measurement could uncover that average eye contact lasts a little longer at the Holy Cow, or that “rate your dining experience” surveys would come back with more comments and artwork squeezed into the margins than they might from elsewhere. But how do you tally the worth of such things? Perhaps the letters of support, the signatures and the sit-ins count as marks. Perhaps one must first experience the richness of connections within wholesome webs to know the value of unquantifiable things – to know their priceless contribution to the quality of life.
I don’t know. But I’m more certain all of the time that conscious connections to the labor we do, the food we eat and the people we deal with are pretty darned important too. We need the magic glue that binds communities just as badly as we need the stuff that holds our bones together. And I think this magic has a lot to do with recognizing and respecting where the things come from that we need. For a decade the Holy Cow has served as an example of operating with such respect and recognition. Five more years is a good thing for Eugene, a victory for our community.
Thomas Veeman is an employee of the Holy Cow Café.
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