When I interviewed Michael Oshman of the Green Restaurant Association (GRA) recently for a Wall Street Journal story, he mentioned that the restaurant industry is the largest consumer of electricity in the U.S. retail sector. It also accounts for half the food budget of the average American. No doubt that's a hefty footprint, but good restaurateurs are known for being nimble, and can adapt changes quickly.
While menu-boasting of shade grown organic coffee or juicy grass-fed burgers topped with local artisanal cheese is often the easiest way to identify a restaurant that’s going green, the real impact comes from changes in the back of the house.
Oshman estimates that the installation of two high efficiency hand dryers – one each restroom – will cost $1,415, but can provide an annual savings of $2,651 and reduce 1,620 pounds of paper towels waste. The installation of a high-efficiency gas-fired charbroiler vs. a conventional one can save 10 metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
Chef Jose Duarte, of Taranta in Boston, recently embraced his inner greenness and certified his restaurant in October 2007. Since then, he’s converted his truck to run on fryer oil, offers a wine list that’s organic, biodynamic and sustainable, composts food scraps, and has a full-scale recycling program. Duarte estimates that he’s reduced 80 metric tons (176,370 pounds) of carbon dioxide a year by making changes to his operations. That’s roughly equivalent to taking 180 cars off the road annually.
But what’s interesting -- with all the changes he’s made, he’s just now starting to look at sourcing his food locally. It’s not easy to do year-round in New England, but I would have thought that would be higher up on the to-do list, since it’s a change that’s so visible to customers. But then again, maybe it’s not all about the marketing.
– Clare Leschin-Hoar
The Soil Association raised a stink about organic produce being air freighted from poor farmers from Africa. Then someone put pencil to paper and showed that produce from UK greenhouses used more fossil fuel than the planes. SA also had no prohibition on air freighting of UK finished products to Anglophiles around the world. Quite the double standard they chose to ignore.
As while back, using some USDA data, we did some back of the envelope calculations on the available farm land within a 150 mile radius (300 mile round trip) of metropolitan areas and discovered that there is less than 2% of farm land available for local production. While nobody will disagree that local product is important, there needs to be some realization that local will not feed a metropolitan area.
But let’s also be realistic that there is no definition of what “Local” means. Is local 100 miles from the farmers market or 200 miles round trip from the point of sale? Local does not mean Non-GMO; Local can be chemically farmed and Local does not have to prove that is Local.
At some point the local advocates will have to sit down and write realistic standards of what local means. Until then it’s just a bunch of feel good BS.
Posted by: Organic George | July 10, 2008 at 07:46 PM
http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_06_30/article.html
This is a must read story
Posted by: Organic George | July 13, 2008 at 11:57 AM
That was an interesting story, and I think it highlights the fact that good food knows no political boundaries. I've found zealous organic farmers, for example, who were from the left and right, democratic and republican, and more than a few libertarians. In fact, that last strand is perhaps most pronounced. Not sure "conservative" is the umbrella for all this, but the new food movement is certainly the alternative to the middle road.
Posted by: Samuel Fromartz | July 17, 2008 at 02:33 PM