Mean and Green

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

Illustrations by Nick Dewar

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Café Gratitude: I Am Strident
Sometimes you just want to eat out but still be green, and on this particular night of my greening, I am vivid. I am graceful. I am insightful. I am fruitful and cheerful and bountiful. At least that’s what they’re telling me. I am at Berkeley’s vegan restaurant Café Gratitude, where my wife and I have been greeted by a bald hostess with awesome facial bone structure and by a lanky, frighteningly cheerful waiter named Mo (or possibly Meau, or even Mow), whose ecstasy strikes me as less Krishna, more Hare Krishna.
 

The first thing I notice is the linens, which although probably clean are gray and dingy-looking from the use of Earth-friendly detergents. They remind me of certain uncomfortable nights at the house of an Earth-obsessed, dingy-linened friend of mine, whose family flushed the toilet only once a week.
 

Here at Gratitude, where diners, at least, are permitted to flush at will, the dishes are named with human qualities whose actual relationships to the food they represent seem tenuous. A lot of the green movement relies on anthropomorphizing nonsentient beings assuming a tree mourns its own death or that a chicken might feel unloved or painfully anonymous in a crowd of chickens, as I might feel at noon on a sunny day in Midtown Manhattan.
 

So, tonight I drink an organic cocktail (vivid), we eat a bowl of quinoa (graceful), and spring rolls (insightful). When Mo delivers our food, he bestows upon us as well the character of the dish. With a glass of wine, I am spirited. At one point, as he places a salad in front of me, he says with great confidence, “You are cheerful.”
 

I’m never cheerful. Nor am I made cheerful by watching, while I eat, two waitresses with shaved-heads nuzzle one another’s stubbly scalps like sleepy kitties, or like some weird, organic, 21st-century exotic dancers.
 

What troubles me more is my newfound capacity for outrage at the presence on the menu of mangoes and coconut milk, which I am pretty sure did not come from anywhere nearby. Sure, nothing was killed for my meal here (except hundreds of fruit flies that swarmed my table and a tiny bit of my soul), but its impact on the planet is not neutral, and by this I am bugged. All through the meal, I can’t get over the exotic, un-green ingredients in my wife’s smoothie and once even tell her, “You probably shouldn’t have ordered that.”
 

The Antidote Gurus
Maybe I’m the one who’s being overly strident now. Maybe all the talk of greening and all the breathless pride of the green shoppers has gotten to me. Maybe I am just lonely and want to be part of the club. More likely the pervasiveness of the green message has infected me, even as it continues to grate.
 

I had jury duty in Alameda County recently, and one of my fellow jurors listed “sustainability associate” as her occupation. She seemed inordinately proud of her title. Still, the inescapable prominence of the word “sustainable,” whatever it happens to mean, has had its effect, and no matter how distastefully obliged I feel to make it to the farmers market, no matter what an outlier I feel like as a non–bag-bringer at Whole Foods, no matter how disconcerting it is that Café Gratitude reminds me of my susceptibility to cults in my college years, I have begun to find myself stressing, hungry to follow the rules to the letter, to shrink my carbon shoe size or whatever. Which would be OK if I wasn’t also beginning to join in the judging of the less enlightened, if I wasn’t finding myself nearly accusing some farmer of selling me nonorganic berries, or some vegan chef of enabling the mango cartels.
 

So, it was a pleasure and a relief to talk to Jessica Prentice, author of Full Moon Feast, and a chef with Three Stone Hearth, a community-supported kitchen in Berkeley. Prentice is a founding pillar of the “locavore” movement, which advocates eating as many locally grown foods as possible, but she counsels me not to let eating local become a fetish or an obsession.
 

“It’s about local first but not local only,” she says, “about getting what you can get locally and seasonally, and getting everything else in larger and larger rings around where you live.”
 

Fortunately, the East Bay and the Bay Area as a whole are well-positioned for good local produce. “We have such a greenbelt around us,” she says, “that you can get a lot of what you need within a hundred miles.” When she tells me this, the first thing I think is, Thank God they’re making better and better wines in Livermore these days.
 

Still, when I attended the Slow Food Nation conference in San Francisco in August, I’m expecting a lot of self-satisfied crowing over all the good being done and all the canvas bags being carried to Whole Foods. Slow Food Nation is part of a worldwide movement of farmers, chefs, and suppliers who favor natural, traditional, preindustrial methods of growing and preparing foods.
 

Onstage are a handful of well-known gurus of the locavore and green movements, including Dan Barber, whose great Blue Hill restaurant outside Manhattan gets about 65 percent of its produce, poultry, and lamb from an adjacent farm, and Michael Pollan, UC Berkeley professor and author of the seminal Omnivore’s Dilemma. In his lucid books and speeches, Pollan makes the argument for a greener food culture accessible to many readers who hadn’t much thought about it. It is hard to avoid him now. People listen when he speaks.
 

I listen, too, and when Pollan warns that “local is magic in the marketplace right now,” my ears perk up. When he freely admits that organic local foods tend to be more expensive than regular grocery store produce (even if they are priced fairly by farmers) and that this is a problem, it is a breath of fresh air to me, and only expands the sense of authority he brings to the issue.
 

Similarly, when the moderator asks Barber how he defines local, the chef is disarmingly frank.
 

“I used to say 200 miles, but then I found this farmer in Pennsylvania who raises delicious grass-fed lamb,” he says, with just a trace of sheepishness in his voice. “So, I increased it to 235 miles.”
 

Finally, I am absolutely gleeful when another panelist says she refuses to give up chocolate and coffee. Turns out, the high priests of the green diet cult are occasional heretics. And that the closer you get to the heart of the movement, it seems, the saner things feel. After the talk, I take to the streets less paranoid, less strident, actually feeling encouraged. Listening to Prentice and Pollan and Barber is a great alternative to the proselytizing messiahs, and a perfect antidote to becoming one.  
 

But Seriously Folks 

Stop. Think about what you are about to eat. How did it get here? How was it processed? How would you possibly pronounce the chemicals and preservatives listed on its package? The answers might give you healthy pause. Then, take these five easy and even pleasurable baby steps to greening your diet:
1. Support local organic farmers by visiting farmers markets, which are richer in local taste—and local color—than the supermarket.
2. Supermarkets sometimes list where their produce comes from; the closer to home, the better.
3. Don’t assume the name of a fancy ranch on the beef or poultry label means quality; look to see no antibiotics were used in the raising of the animal and that it ranged free.
4. Eating fruits and vegetables in season is a culinary pleasure; a peach tastes way better in July than in January; see www.localfoodswheel.com for what grows best when in the Bay Area.
5. Better yet, grow your own, then you’ll know for sure what made that tomato so delicious: you. Can’t get more local than that.