| CITY OF ATE | ▼ Dish A Choice Cake Hive Bakery cooks up a progressive stance in Flower Mound. BY TYLER HICKS I t started with a sticker. About four years ago, baker Haley Popp slapped a sticker on the front of her shop that declared she and her team affirm LGBTQ rights. Or, as Popp puts it, “We’ll make cakes for fucking anybody.” Many residents of Flower Mound, a sub- urb of about 80,000 northwest of Dallas where Popp’s Hive Bakery is based, were not happy. According to the baker, it was around this time that her neighbors (many of whom used a Facebook group called “Flower Mound Cares”) started calling her, among other things, “fucking trash,” a “fucking bitch” or a “fucking whore.” The harass- ment wasn’t confined to the internet, either. Popp, whose vibrant red hair is instantly recognizable, has appeared on Food Net- work’s Halloween Wars and become, as her staff puts it, “Flower Mound famous.” That’s not always a good thing. “I’ve had someone call me a bitch to my face at Target,” she says. “Certain members of this town have disdain for me and things I stand for.” In other words, the sticker incident sparked a trend: Popp speaks up about equality, rights and movements like Black Lives Matter, and hordes of conservative trolls emerge with profane posts, abusive phone calls and emails pledging to end her career. The trend has continued throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. “When COVID hit and we were mask- mandating in the store, people would come here and yell stuff like, ‘It’s my fucking right; I don’t have to wear this shit in your store,’” Popp says. Then, in early May, the harassment took on a different hue. Following the leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion that signals the court will overturn abortion rights, Popp used Hive Bakery’s social media accounts to post a pic- ture of a cake with the words “My Body, My Choice” etched in icing. The backlash was swift, with many commenters labeling Popp a “murderer” and one person writing, in part, that they will “make it my duty to take as much clientele as possible.” “Fuck you for supporting murdering in- nocent babies that cannot fight back,” the commenter continued. “Hope you feel real important bitch.” Popp is used to this kind of response, but over the phone with the Observer roughly a week after the leak, she admitted the harass- Haley Popp and Hive Bakery ment was particularly vile this time. “I think what put this over the top this time is obviously abortion is a hot-button is- sue, and we live in a very Trumper voter area, so they’ve been emboldened to spew hate,” she says. Eventually, Popp started capturing screen shots of comments and posting them on social media — name and all. That led to a series of emails wherein the harassers would cycle through some combination of fury, legal threats and, ultimately, an apology and plea for the post to be taken down. Fortunately, the response hasn’t been all negative. When Popp first began sharing her views openly, she held out hope that she wouldn’t be the lone liberal voice. “Anytime there’s anything of note that’s going on in the world, I want to speak about it — especially to the people in my town,” she says. “I remember thinking, ‘There have to be more people like me here. I can’t be the only one.’” She was right. In the last week, the Hive faithful have rallied around the bakery with words of en- couragement and blockbuster sales. In fact, on the Saturday morning after the Supreme Court leak, the line of customers stretched out the door and into the parking lot. That afternoon, all the shelves were completely bare: The bakery was sold out hours before closing. As of Tuesday, May 10, a full week after the leak, Popp said the store was still selling out every day. “I think we might have a cup- cake and a brownie, and that’s it,” she said. Popp relishes that love, which, thankfully, always shows up just as the trolls roll in. “We’ve always had customers who have had our back,” she says. “If you drop a dirty sentence online, there’s a swarm of people ready to have our back. [The support] really proves to me that this town is not all alt- right conservative. There’s a very large pocket of liberals here in the Flower Mound area.” A photo of this cake on the Hive Bakery’s Facebook page created a slew of positive and negative feedback. Hive Bakery occupies a sliver of the sub- urb’s picturesque Parker Square. Nestled be- tween a frame store and a brunch place, it’s probably not where you’d expect to find a haven of baked goods and “progressive” opinions like a belief in bodily autonomy. Popp is quick to point out that she is neither a Democrat nor a Republican; in her words, “Hive and I stand for all things that are equality in life.” Even still, she’s eager to get a Democrat to visit her bakery: gubernatorial hopeful Beto O’Rourke. “I have to do what’s best for my family and my friends,” she says, and to her, that means campaigning for O’Rourke. By bring- ing the candidate to town, she hopes to fur- ther encourage local liberals and all disengaged parties to vote for candidates who support reproductive rights and equal- ity at large. “In the suburbs, I think there’s a large crop of people who don’t actively involve themselves in politics because they think it doesn’t affect them,” she says. “But they’re wrong. Things like overturning Roe v. Wade will echo for generations.” ▼ FOOD NEWS SO DOPE R HOPEBOY IS BACK IN OAK CLIFF WITH VEGAN FARE THIS TIME. BY ALEX GONZALEZ ico Alexander is on a mission to nour- ish his community. As the founder of Hopeboy’s Kitchen, a vegan food trailer docked at Tyler Station near Oak Cliff Brewing Co., Alexander wants to provide healthy, delicious food options in a neigh- borhood where these seem scarce. HopeBoy’s Kitchen first opened this past January. Alexander himself adapted a vegan diet four years ago, inspired to take up healthier habits after his mother died from cancer at 43 and his father died of a heart at- tack at 50. “The closer I got to 43, it just started weighing on me to make healthier choices,” Alexander says. “About 10 years ago, I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. I was over- weight and lost 70 pounds to kind of ‘cor- rect’ that Type 2 diabetes, but then that sent me on a journey, searching for which diet or which lifestyle that I needed to start practic- ing. I did tons of research on veganism, and it seemed like it was in my favor. I started out with a 30-day challenge, and before I knew it, here we are.” About 25 years before opening Hope- Boy’s, Alexander served a four-year prison sentence for dealing drugs in Oak Cliff. Dur- ing that time is when his mother was sick. While he was able to see her three weeks be- fore she passed — he was out on furlough for a few hours one day — he was unable to be with her during her final moments, which is when it really began to click with him that he had to turn his life around. Alexander was released in 2001 and on parole through 2006, and since then has never looked back on the “dope boy” life- style. His mission since has been to heal both himself and the community in which he sold drugs. “Just like the person that you’re dealing drugs to, who’s addicted to those drugs, the drug dealer is addicted to that lifestyle,” Al- exander says. “You’re trying to obtain as much money and power as you can, but at the end of the day, that’s not going to last. It’s very difficult to get out of the game because it’s a mindset. It’s a culture, and you can be embedded in a culture, and you don’t even know it.” When he first got into veganism, Alexan- der cooked meals at home and shared pic- tures on his Facebook page. People quickly noticed and expressed interest in trying his meals. “I live in Grand Prairie, but my heart is in like Oak Cliff and South Dallas,” Alexander says. “Because I feel like those are the peo- ple that I connect with the most, and where I’ve done the most damage. What eventually happened was I would prepare tons of food, and I would meet everyone at a Target over off of Wheatland and 20. Everybody would come there and just pick up their food at a designated time.” Alexander’s hustle quickly evolved into pop-ups in Oak Cliff and DeSoto. He was eventually able to purchase a food trailer but initially didn’t have any idea where he would dock his mobile kitchen. He received an offer from the property owner of Tyler Station, the small business and shopping center located near the Tyler/Vernon DART station, and since then he has been operat- ing multiple times a week, serving vegan de- lights behind Oak Cliff Brewing Co. Some of his biggest-selling items include the Big Smac with fries, which is Alexan- der’s vegan take on the Big Mac ($16); chili cheese tots ($12-$15); and a barbecue sand- wich made with jackfruit ($16). The Big Smac, made with Beyond patties, tastes un- like any vegan burger you’ll find at the many burger joints opting to include plant-based substitutes on their menus. Alexander uses a house-made spice blend on all of his >> p20 19 19 dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com | CONTENTS | UNFAIR PARK | SCHUTZE | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | MOVIES | DISH | MUSIC | CLASSIFIED | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 MAY 19–25, 2022
