Mean and Green

One man's quest for an eco-friendly diet. And you thought low-fat was a drag!

Illustration by Nick Dewar

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For years I’ve felt guilty and depressed with every piece of food I put in my mouth either because it was going to make me fatter or less healthy, or else because it wasn’t. Think rice cakes. Now comes the green movement, and the greening of everything from birth (you do it at home) to burial (no coffins, just dirt). The latest mandate is to make sure that your diet is green. More and more, especially in the East Bay and around Northern California, if you’re not eating green, and telling everyone about it, then you are a recalcitrant laggard abuser of the planet Earth.
 

Maybe I’m imagining all this. It’s not as if anyone has confronted me exactly, over, say, a plastic grocery bag full of boxes of Rice Krispies. But I see the looks. I know what you’re thinking.

Recently, partly for health reasons, partly in reluctant reaction to the constant bongo beat of the sustainability movement echoing in my ears, I tried to deepen the greenish hue of my already fairly green kitchen and diet. I upped my farmers market shopping, my Whole Foods visits, and even my green dining-out experiences.
 

If I eventually found a quiet, reasonable center of the movement, first I had to come to terms with the movement’s sometimes cultlike, always self-satisfied, always vigilant adherents, whose sense of mission and self-importance has only expanded as the once-revolutionary organic food movement has evolved into the stuff of cynical advertisers. For them, green has replaced sex as the preferred selling point of everything from cars to checking accounts.
 

No doubt this is a sign of the movement’s effectiveness, and good for it. But I miss all the sex.
 

Farmers Markets Don’t Carry Rice Krispies
I probably never handled an actual clove of garlic or leaf of fresh spinach until I was in my twenties. This is not to dishonor my mother’s cooking or my parents’ earnest, perfectly successful daily quest to nourish me. It’s just that much of that nourishment came from cans.
 

Still, somehow, in my everyday adult life, I was already pretty green, if by green you mean buying local, trying to eat a lot of plants (not hydrangeas, but, you know, arugula and such), and trying to avoid processed food and corn-fed beef.
 

Long before the Greenaissance, I lived over in Davis for three very green years. Davis is home to one of the great farmers markets in the West. Every Saturday morning, without being guilted into it by anyone, my wife and I would happily pedal—that’s right, on bikes—to Davis’ Central Park and stroll among the other happy Central Valley folk, picking up the season’s local bounty while banjos played and little kids frolicked, and hungover college students slept off another big night.
 

Back then, unenlightened as we were, we didn’t feel required to sacrifice the bounty of the modern age. When we wanted zucchini in January, for instance, we headed out to the grocery store and bought some. Now we must eschew such things: To be green and guilt-free, you must eat only those vegetables and fruits in season, and those that are suited to the soil and climate where you live so that food isn’t being trucked all over kingdom come to get to your table. Even in California, there are seasons when you shouldn’t eat tomatoes, for example, or asparagus.
 

Yet seasonal limitations are not the scariest thing about eating locally grown foods. The asparagus will return each spring, and surely its temporary absence will make the palate grow fonder. The real terror sets in when you realize that, in theory anyway, eating locally eliminates certain beloved items, such as mangoes and coconut, from our diets. And never should you eat bananas. Chocolate. Dear God, coffee. I wonder if I ought to move to New Guinea. Or at least Costa Rica.

There are other subtler adjustments to be made. Grass-fed beef, better for the Earth and the cow, tends to have a different texture and flavor than what I grew up on. Recently, a chef I know told me that often his diners send grass-fed lamb dishes back, saying it is too tough, even though he uses a method of slow-cooking, sous vide, that adds tenderness. Only problem is that sous vide cooking requires plastic bags and lots of energy, and so amplifies his dishes’ impact on the environment, and in some ways might defeat the purpose of that environmentally sound lamb he’s served. Sometimes, green purists give him hell for the sous vide thing. Sometimes, you can’t win.
 

I’m lucky, though. I now live in Oakland, where in a lot of ways it’s comparatively easy to keep your diet and your kitchen green. For all of its heartbreaking problems, this city, which I love, is in the vanguard of the waste-free movement. We recycle without having to separate plastic and paper, and into our green bins we throw everything from bones to pizza boxes. Some weeks, our trash cans are nearly empty.