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No bones about it

They recently opened a vegan cafe but this pair are not new to a lifestyle without meat.

Kirsten Lawson
Kirsten Lawson

Sweet Bones owners Emily and Russell Brindley.
Sweet Bones owners Emily and Russell Brindley.Jay Cronan

The paleo diet, with its focus on meat protein, is arguably more prominently on the radar than its virtual opposite, a vegan diet, but it's a vegan cafe that is making the noise in Canberra at the moment. Sweet Bones is a tiny, shabby-chic set up in the super-homespun Traders Mall in Lonsdale Street, run by a couple still in their 20s.

They are not, owners Russell and Emily Brindley insist, simply tuning into a hipster trend. Rather, this is how they live, their lives and their diet now shared with whoever wants to head in here for a vegan cupcake or brownie, sandwich, wraps, or salad, granola - everything vegan other than the milk with coffee. Over summer, they also do a vegan dinner on Thursdays.

The day we visit, Emily Brindley is planning the evening's menu - wild rice salad, with a maple and miso-glazed baked tofu, a seaweed and kale salad, and balsamic caramelised beetroot.

Vegan cupcakes at Sweet Bones in Lonsdale Street.
Vegan cupcakes at Sweet Bones in Lonsdale Street.Jay Cronan
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Menu is the wrong word, since this is the only option for dinner - there's one thing offered each Thursday, 5pm-9pm, and she plans for about 60 people.

The meal is for Valentine's night, so they also had candles set up in the tiny narrow alleyway out the back, where they're growing a few tomatoes and edibles in pots. There's another small group of tables set up in the mall area, alongside a bike rack for the neighbouring bike shop.

It is homespun and very casual, and judging by the response from customers, it's also just what people are after.

The couple was brought up at different ends of the globe - she is from New Jersey, he from near Queanbeyan, but they share much in their families' approaches to life.

Russell Brindley, 28, a professional BMXer, was brought up on a hobby farm near Queanbeyan and by 16 had left school and was on the BMX circuit. He was also vegan, rejecting all animal products, meat, eggs and dairy, and says he was influenced mainly by his idols in the world of pro BMXing. Vegetarianism and veganism had a hold in that world and the teenage he made the switch, too. His upbringing on the land reinforced the decision. "Just being with the animals - having pet cows and goats and chickens, things like that, I couldn't imagine eating our pets on the property." His mother was committed to health food and his sister is now also vegan.

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Russell Brindley has scruffy blondish hair under a cap. His wife is bright-eyed and has a kind of 1950s American rockabilly look.

They're quietly spoken and share a kind of sharp-edged conviction, which is neither fervent nor strident, but nor is it fuzzy on the margins.

Russell Brindley's BMX riding feels suited to his under-stated, underground ethos. It's a big passion and he spends part of his year on the world circuit, including competitions, but he plays down the competitive part of what he does. When you ask about winning, he concedes that yes, he wins sometimes but he's vague about what and where and when. Winning is not the point. What he likes is "free riding", dirt jumps and the like. "Competitions I go into are a minor part of the riding," he says.

It was at a bike event in the US six years ago that he met Emily Fisher, a chef from New Jersey. Emily, then 22, is the daughter of a man who works as a heavy-machine operator and a mother who works in a pharmacy, both of them connected to the land and big on gardening. Her mother, she says, belonged to a co-op and ate "natural foods". Her dad was a hunter and Emily was already vegetarian, thanks in part to a taunting brother.

"I never liked eating meat, especially when I made the connection that a deer was venison and my brother loved that. When I ate that he would be like, "you just ate Bambi". It took longer to discover that steak came from a cow but once she learnt that truth, beef was off the menu also.

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She had just quit her job and was about to move to California in 2006 when she met Brindley. She moved to a vegan diet and added to her cheffing qualification with a certificate in raw food from Living Light International in California.

By 2007, the pair were living in Canberra (they married in 2008), working at Organic Energy in Griffith, where she made the vegan ice-cream sold at the store and taught raw-food classes (which she still does occasionally). The ice cream, she says, is based on cashews and young coconut meat, with flavours such as passionfruit, chocolate and coffee.

Eighteen months ago, they entered the world of commercial baking. "My parents came and visited for the first time in 2011," Emily Brindley says. "When they left, I got into a depression and all I did was bake. Then Russell's brother [a Sydney magician who goes by the professional name Adam Mada, clearly a creative family] said 'these are ridiculously good, why aren't they in a cafe?' He made a phone call and set up a meeting and it took off from there."

The couple began baking cupcakes, banana bread, muffins and the like for Lonsdale Street Roasters, Organic Energy, Mocan and Green Grout, Ona in Manuka and Red Brick in Curtin. They were making 100 cupcakes a week when the opportunity came last year to open their own cafe.

In typical 2012 style, they raised the money with the help of crowd-funding, through New York-based website Kickstarter. They registered their project at the end of November and within a month had exceeded their $10,000 target through almost 200 small donations. Donors are thanked in muffins and the like.

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Emily Brindley says fitting out their tiny cafe in the Lonsdale Street mall cost $25,000 to $30,000, even using secondhand equipment and doing the labour themselves, and she took her lead from a girlfriend who opened a vegan bakery in Austin, Texas, using help from Kickstarter donations.

The cafe opened at the end of last November. Now, they're making 400 cupcakes a week, as well as other baked goods, lunches and the once-a-week dinners.

For this pair, vegan food is about the entire package - the animals, the environment, the lifestyle, the organics and health.

Compassion for animals came first, Emily Brindley says. "For me, once I realised animals were on my plate, I didn't want to eat them. I didn't need to eat them." Then came awareness of the health benefits: "I really believe that animal products are really bad for you, especially dairy. We're the only animals that drink other animals' milk," she says. And the environmental benefits followed on from that.

But I'm wondering about the emphasis on baked goods. If you're going to head down the path of super-healthy eating, the first thing you would jettison would be sweet stuff, right?

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Well, they respond, it's easier to adopt a vegan lifestyle if you don't have to quit sweet foods.

"This is all stuff that when people commit to being vegan that's all stuff that they can't have any more," Russell Brindley says. "So a healthy alternative is like really good for those people."

The Sweet Bones baked goods are made with organic biodynamic flour organic raw sugar, aluminium-free baking soda and, in place of eggs, butter and milk, they use apple cider vinegar and soy milk. The frosting is made with preservative-free, additive-free, non-homogenised margarine. "You're not going to eat it for dinner," Russell Brindley says. "But if you want it [sweet foods] this is a good way to go."

"If you want to look at it as being a cake, then you can, but it's more than just a cake," his wife adds. "It's not a white, processed, nutrientless cake."

If leanness is an indication of health (and it largely is), then the Brindleys are shining examples of the rightness of their path. ''We've always been skin and bones,'' she says (and from that comes the name of their cafe) and it's not only in the diet - there's his BMXing, and her dancing - she does reggaeton dance, an African, Latin American mix, and both practice yoga.

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They also cook raw food (although as Russell Brindley points out, this is more "un-cooking"). Breakfast is a green smoothie and they eat loads of salads. In the cafe, they offer a green smoothie and a raw cheesecake (with cashew and coconut meat as the base), and have done a raw food dinner.

But they also eat cooked vegan food. A typical meal might be chilli beans, or kale with white beans and polenta. They use macadamia oil or coconut oil in cooking, rather than olive oil, which they say becomes toxic when heated. Both macadamia and coconut oil have a high tolerance for heat.

And supplements? B12 once in a while but that's it, Emily Brindley says. "We've both been checked numerous times and we're both fine."

Sweet Bones is open 8am to 2pm Tuesday to Saturday, and 9.30am to 3pm Sunday. The Thursday evening dinners finish for winter after March 21 (no bookings).

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Kirsten LawsonKirsten Lawson is news director at The Canberra Times

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