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| State fare: The lamb served at L.A.'s Grace Restaurant is from Sonoma County, California. Courtesy of Grace Restaurant |
More restaurants are going green by going local
One Los Angeles menu boasts dishes where 90 percent of the ingredients were raised within 400 miles.
from the July 30, 2007 edition
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One measure of the interest is the growth of the Green Restaurant Association, which certifies restaurants coast to coast and encourages them to take four new steps to help the environment each year. Founded in 1990 in San Diego, the association has seen the number of its certified restaurants skyrocket from 60 to 300 in the past two years. The group is also negotiating with major restaurant chains, which could rapidly boost membership to 5,000.
"In the last year we have gotten more interest than in the previous 16 years combined," says founder and director Michael Oshman. "It's beginning to build exponentially from interest of previous decades."
Such restaurants are also drawing attention to the plight of smaller farms, ranches, and suppliers whose practices fit the model but are in danger of being lost.
"Government policies are making it very hard for the smaller, independent, family-run businesses, which operate with higher environmental standards," says Mike Antoci, who runs Superior Anhausner Foods, a Los Angeles distributor. "Restaurants like Fraser's are starting to raise public consciousness about what is at stake."
The new spotlight is creating a domino effect, say observers, in which restaurant customers begin to ask more questions about the local-food movement.
"We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people who value the availability of food produced right in their own community," says Linda Halley, who runs Fairview Gardens, a nonprofit organic farm and education center in Goleta, Calif.
Some observers question some of the claims of the local-food movement. They say it's entirely possible that food grown locally could have a considerably larger carbon footprint than food flown halfway around the world because transportation represents only a tiny fraction – some experts say as little as 2 percent – of the energy required to grow, store, process, and package the food.
Supporters say that the movement is raising questions that society needs to ask. Mr. Oshman notes that Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, with 200 stores nationwide, was the first large chain to be certified green last year and this year has announced it will run its stores on windpower exclusively. "If larger chains like this can do it, it shows this is not a fringe thing anymore."
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