I've been looking for an excuse to rant about all the pseudo-environmentalism going on lately, and Leslie Brenner's review of Abode in the Times is the perfect chance. Leslie is much meaner than S. Irene (we still remember her skewering of Peninsula's restaurant), and thus much more fun. She writes that the supposedly sustainable and local Santa Monica restaurant sources luxury food items seemingly everywhere except California...whoops!
All this "green" talk is very nice, but I'm kind of tired of Vogue writers going on about expensive organic t-shirts and shampoo or film studios patting themselves on the back for using biodegradable plates for craft service. How do they think they're supposed to biodegrade after being trucked to a landfill forever encased in a plastic trash bag? It's not like they have a giant craft services field somewhere where plates are slowly being absorbed back into the earth. Sorry, but none of those fashionable efforts are going to do a damn thing to save the earth. Maybe if they concentrated on SUVs, factories, pollution from third world countries, and the government's collective yawn over alternative energy sources, they might get somewhere.
And memo to Times letter writers: OK, we get it already. "My favorite weekend" is a fantasy weekend -- it's not supposed to be about how people actually spend their weekend at the dry cleaners and Home Depot, because that would be boring. Of course, that doesn't stop many of the TV actors profiled from having incredibly boring lives anyway. But snaps to Sean Lennon this week, who gives a shout-out to my favorite place to eat in Malibu, John's Garden, where I used to get $1.00 locally-grown salads when I was in high school.
2 comments:
Wow... what a (well-deserved) burn from Leslie.
As "greening" of supermarkets and restaurants become more mainstream, I anticipate Leslie's main point to become an even bigger issue. Is it really more Earth friendly to have to fly organically grown, in-season produce from halfway around the world than to just eat the conventional stuff from a few miles over?
What I think hits closer to the mark is the Slow Food movement, but even then I'd wish they focus more on educating people how to cook & prepare the locally-available in-season foods.
I had a fantastic waiter at Figaro who, when I asked him about the difference between wines and dishes labelled "biodynamic" and "sustainable" and "organic", said "Mostly different bulls--t."
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