When I look back on a lot of my time in the kitchen, I could almost kick myself. The sheer number of hours I spent chopping away and swiping my cutting board into the trash is mind numbing to think about the amount of waste I created. But let's be honest, it was the 90's and there was a lot that we knew but didn't really embrace. The 80's were worse and don't even get me started on the 50's, 60's, 70's...We could have all have done better but we could not have done much worse.
The Green Kitchen now is a novel concept. It is something that garners ooh's and ahh's from a lot of people now, but my mother is non-plussed. When she reads about a place like Sandwich Me In in Chicago she is very blase because she remembers a time. There was a time when everything was not exactly zero waste, but a far sight greener than we see today.
She told me about the summer that she worked at a little bistro in Paris and the pig farmer up the road who would come to get their scraps for his pigs. In return, they got the best of deals on pancetta and the freshest leanest cuts of pork. She told me about the milk bottles that they had when she was a kid and how the idea of a plastic milk bottle today freaks her out a little now. She lives alone now and feels a little better about cardboard cartons but upon hearing that there is a place in Pennsylvania that delivers milk in bottles by horse drawn cart, she wonders if they would be willing to deliver to Queens, NY.
She does things like that all the time. I told her that California just banned plastic bags she said it was about time and wondered why anyone ever used those things anyway for fear of slicing their fingers. Paper was not much better for her. She prefers a blue and white NPR tote bag that she commandeered from my closet one day, and before that a pink and white Lindemann's bag that she has no idea where it has gone. She things my dad might have used it the day before he passed away and secretly believes that he was shopping behind her back...but that is another story.
Her trash is always so light and airy when, even when I lived alone, I had big heavy sacks of dripping garbage that I had to haul to the gaping maw of the incinerator. And then where did it go? She grows tomatoes and basil and spinach and onions and potatoes galore out on her patio and on the roof because she always has, she says and I have never seen her buy a seed. So when someone posts something about how to grow celery or onions from cuttings, she scoffs. My mom was green before it was cool and she could put most hippies to shame.
Now that I think about it, I could do more. I called her the other day and told her that we are planning a massive initiative out at the farm and that we are going to try to compost or re-use everything that comes on the property. Even though she is a few thousand miles away, I could feel myself lean forward ever so slightly as if expecting a pat on the head. None came.
Instead we began to talk about how she hoped that we could see the error of our ways. She began to express a little regret that she had not done more, but still held to the belief that she had done her best. She raised two girls in a busy restaurant and hey, she had to make things easier when she could. For my mother making things easier often meant buying from the local vendor she didn't have the best relationship with because we were close to dinner service. It NEVER meant buying a tomato from Argentina. For a moment, I felt as if she thought I was guilting her about something. Still even on her worst day, she was greener than any restaurant that I ever worked in.
Now the pendulum swings back but there is an unspoken (or sometimes screamed?) fear that it might be too late. We have spent so much time making things more convenient for the moment that we have forgotten about the future.
I remember her and my father once discussing what "organic" meant. My father explained that it meant that it was grown without chemicals. I heard her make mention that perhaps the organic should not be the oddity but the label should be on the thing grown WITH chemicals. My father sighed his sigh and walked away as she reminded him very loudly that in their day EVERYTHING was organic!
Now as adults, my sister and I chat about organic x and y and GMO whatever and it is like another language to my mother. It is a dead language almost as if we were speaking Aramaic or something. We are trying but how far back will the pendulum swing?
Being a chef, I tend to think of things both in long term and short term and now I have to apply that to the farm. Now being a mom as well, I am thinking about the long LONG term in terms of my child and (uggh!) grand kids, etc.
I like to think of my age group as an anomaly; the ones who did it wrong for a bit, about 50 years or so and then started getting it right. If I am lucky, if we all are lucky, then both my daughter and my mother will think that this blip in time was a mistake and they will both look at me like I am nuts when I go to throw away something that could be easily recycled or composted.
I said all of that because we at 99Knives have made a new commitment. On top of everything else that we are doing, we are incorporating composting into the construction of our new world and not just in California, but at each of our farm participant campuses. Last night alone, we gathered over 300 pounds of compostable matter from restaurants and coffee shops in South Carolina and have made the commitment to doing over 100 tons nationwide in the next 365 days. It's a start. All of this matter will be saved from landfills and used either for sale or for use in community gardens all across the state. Goodness knows that we need a lot of it on our land.
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