Afterthoughts, a Reprise: A few words about “Green, The Trend. Sustainable, The Fad.”

(This reprises the Afterthought of the May 1985 essay, Upscale Madness.  Although the copy is identical, the relevance to the preceding column, Prepared for the Future, is different.)

Both Green and Sustainable are wholesome whims. Each is worthy of our attention, but neither is so perfect, so absent of boundaries to have earned, free from disclaimers, the uncompromising praise food writers, bloggers and environmentalists have piled on them. There are options, but the Greens won’t hear of them. There are, options, but the Sustainables refuse to admit they exist.

Here we go.

Green, The Trend  If, in building your restaurant, you build it with discarded beer cans, cardboard boxes, and God only knows what else—the detritus of rubbish (anything you find digging through residential, preferably upscale, Dumpsters)—and design your restaurant’s interior so that it has all the charm of a lean-to, then you are thought to be Green Trendy, allowed to join the self-absorbed of all things hip.

Stairway to Heaven and the
Temple of Enlightened Cuisine.

Sustainable, The Fad  If, in the kitchen of your Green Trendy restaurant, you cook with local and fresh backyard-grown produce and slaughter your own free-range fowl, cow, pig; or, if you find PETA cuddly and lovable and are a vegan dive, cultivate your own garden that is either behind, around, or on top of your restaurant and abstain from cooking any life form that has more than a single cell, then you are thought to be worthy of praise, suitable—no questions asked—for acceptance into the Extreme Sustainables Hall of Fame, eligible for canonization by associations (so many of them) eager to sacrifice a PETA-approved fatted calf at your Temple of  Enlightened Cuisine.

There is no such organization as Extreme Sustainables Hall of Fame. But, just you wait: it is only a matter of time.

Stairway to heaven: Thanomphong.Jantharotjana; dumpster: Larry Powell