Mean and Green

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

Illustrations by Nick Dewar

(page 2 of 3)

But even in a town where at least twice a week there are great farmers markets as close to my house as any supermarket, moments like this, which once would have gone unnoted, abound:
 

I just ate a bowl of Rice Krispies with half a spoonful of refined sugar and some dried cranberries from who knows where, and I feel just awful about it. Oh, and there was nonfat milk in it, too. Pasteurized. I was hungry and running late, and had failed to plan ahead, had failed to make sure I had handy some unprocessed snack food, some locally grown fruit or locally made bread of local grains grown organically.
 

Just days before I had gone to the great farmers market at Oakland’s Splash Pad Park, where often the organic vegetables harvested the day before look cleaner than the people buying them, but that’s OK. There I had bought nectarines from the San Joaquin Valley, sweet summer squash and pink Brandywine tomatoes from Lodi, and some juicy-looking blackberries from Watsonville that might not have been organic, but I had started to pay before I realized this. And, for the first time in my life, I almost spoke out in public, nearly became one of those proud trumpeters of the good I’m doing: Wait! These are organic, right? But to balk at that point, with my hand reaching out across the table to pay, would have seemed, well, pushy. So I bought the berries and felt guilty about it instead.
 

I’m reminded of that moment of guilt in this new one, as I replace the blue cereal box. The problem is that all that fresh, unprocessed food I bought on Sunday has been consumed, with pleasure, but also with alacrity because the weather was warm and the fruit flies were swarming. I hadn’t had time to get back to the store all week. Sometimes, the processed stuff with all the preservatives in it just comes in handy.
 

Still, part of me feels like I have committed a crime against the cosmos or worse, against all the proud eschewers of General Mills products, the proud bringers of their own bags to the market. This confession is not meant as a purgative. It is meant to demonstrate the way a certain small if increasingly influential segment of society has succeeded in turning the repetitive acts of everyday life into one long string of guilt trips.
 

Because today, even an innocent mistake can make you feel like a criminal. Even my own wife, the most reasonable person I’ve ever met, has been known to ask me, as she holds up a Peet’s coffee cup I’d thrown in the trash and places it with the recycling, “Why do you hate the Earth?”
 

Whole Foods: Not My Bag
 

I do not hate the Earth, even if I have faith in its resilience. And I know this corrective green movement will give it a chance to rebound.
 

I have to remind myself of this sometimes, particularly when I go to Whole Foods, the gleaming Studio 54 of the sustainability movement, where the beautiful members of the movement, its regular bathers, let’s say, gather, where sometimes I feel as if people are looking at me disdainfully not because I’m not well-groomed most of the time, but because I haven’t brought my own bags.
 

But it often seems like the people who do bring their own bags pause as, reverentially, they pull them out to make sure everyone is watching. This gives time for other bag-bringers to nod their approval and acceptance, to acknowledge their mutual roles as saviors of the Earth. It also gives time for the non–bag-bringers like me to feel inferior for however long we wait for their tofu and baby bok choy to be bagged. Or their shameful Gala apples from New Zealand.
 

So far, the contrarian jackass that lingers within me refuses to buy reusable canvas bags or bring old used bags to the store just so no one will have the satisfaction of thinking all those stinkeyes have influenced my behavior.