'Would you like a plant with that?' How a Culver City vegan restaurant supports bees and butterflies

Hey, Sunshine Kitchen is in the middle of a strip mall in Culver City. The restaurant is an island of vegan food surrounded by concrete and asphalt. And every Monday, its owners do their part to spread some pollinator love by giving away free native plants to their lunchtime customers.

“This is our pollinator program ... that we created in order to bring back the habitat of bees, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds and other pollinators,” said Heather Golden Ray, co-owner of the restaurant with her sister Jenny Engel.

She and her sister have given away thousands of plants over the past two years to help people think differently about what they eat — and their role in maintaining a healthy environment.

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Little plants make a big difference

Matt Diamond picks up a free plant with his meal.

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Adolfo Guzman-Lopez

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You’ll miss the pollinator initiative if you walk straight through the restaurant’s glass doors. That’s because the program is a waist-high cart with 15 plants stationed just outside. So Heather and Jenny make sure each customer knows it’s there.

“Would you like a plant?” Golden Ray asks customer Matt Diamond as he walks out of the restaurant with his takeout lunch of a vegan chicken Caesar salad and carnitas bowl.

He takes a California fuchsia.

“We just started our garden; my girlfriend's going to love it,” Diamond said.

He asked this LAist reporter if the plant will help the bees. The reporter said, yes. Diamond believes this small effort of taking this plant home is a way for him to feel less helpless about climate change.

“Because when you read the news, a lot of times you think there's nothing we can do, and we're just in trouble. So I love seeing things like this and helping out wherever we can,” he said.

Heather Golden Ray, who used to teach vegan cooking classes for 15 years, at Hey, Sunshine Kitchen.

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The restaurant’s owners have spent decades promoting a plant-based lifestyle. Before opening this restaurant, they ran a vegan cooking school for 15 years. The goal: helping people see that eating doesn’t have to involve harming animals.

“We're teaching kindness and compassion through what we're doing,” Golden Ray said.

“We're trying to nurture people's health, so this is an all-encompassing company. We're not just in this to make some cash, because I don't think we would open a restaurant if we wanted to do that,” she said.

LaQuetta Shamblee picked up a free plant with her food order at Hey, Sunshine Kitchen in Culver City.

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LaQuetta Shamblee drove from Compton to have lunch with a friend.

She said the animated "Bee Movie" taught her the ripple effect of losing pollinators and how small actions can make a difference.

" Is a penny important?" she asked. "Multiply it, and it becomes a dollar, a hundred dollars, a thousand dollars, a million dollars. If more and more people would do this, it's the same thing. Exponential impact."

Partnership with a local non profit

Golden Ray and Engel initially purchased the plants at a local nursery with sponsorships. But then they met the South Bay Parkland Conservancy, a group with a similar vision. Now the conservancy provides the plants at a generous discount. But the sisters are still looking for a sponsor to cover all the costs.

Two of the pollinator plants offered on a recent Monday at Hey, Sunshine Kitchen.

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Adolfo Guzman-Lopez

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LAist

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Hey, Sunshine Kitchen offers customers packets of native plant seeds too.

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Adolfo Guzman-Lopez

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LAist

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And on other days of the week, a basket next to the cash register holds brown packets of pollinator plant seeds for people to plant at home or other places.

The sisters want to spread this worldview across the country. They’d like to expand the restaurant, along with the pollinator plant initiative outside of Culver City.

“We want to have a botanist on staff who can say, listen, in New York, these are the plants we need, in Texas these are the plants we need.  These are the big dreams that we have,” Golden Ray said.