The conference has gotten greener too (the Sheraton’s also part of the Chicago Green Hotels Initiative (PDF) — though honestly I haven’t seen much evidence of eco-friendliness in the hotel beyond a note encouraging people to reuse their towels) — with the conference shwag bag itself made of recycled materials. Inside’s a second organic cotton tote bag from Green Works and a certified organic lip balm. There’s also a lot of of not particularly green stuff — including a Mr. Potato Head I got my roommate to take off my hands….

If you’re at BlogHer ’09, come to my Green Leadership panel tomorrow at 3:15 pm in Michigan A&B. Then say hi afterwards — I”ll be giving out free BPA-free water bottles from FilterForGood, my trip sponsor, post-panel.

If you’re not here, follow the liveblog.

But for this post, I’ve decided to focus on the important stuff: Food. Yummy green Chicago dining spots I’ve visited:

Coffee lovers: Swim Cafe. Go here for 100% fair trade coffee from Just Coffee, tasty food that supports organic agriculture, and a relaxed atmosphere. The indie coffee shop’s been made famous by Young American Bodies — Above’s the panini I ate during the last BlogHer. Find it at 1357 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago.

Pizza lovers: Crust. This organic restaurant makes very tasty flatbread pizzas — great with organic vodka cocktails organic pinot blanc  or other yummy organic drinks. 95% of the ingredients used at this eatery are organic. Two  years ago I had a “Shrooms” pizza with yummy fresh mushrooms, goat cheese, and seasoned spinach. 2056 W. Division St., Chicago.

Veg and vegan food lovers: The Chicago Diner.. This very chilled out and popular spot’s proudly meat free — and serves up some yummy organic cocktails and fair trade coffee too. Vegetarians, vegans, and raw foodies will all find something to love here. The vegan reuben’s apparently the house specialty, but I can attest to the wilted spinach salad’s yumminess too. 3411 N. Halsted., Chicago.

Fine diners: Green Zebra. This higher-end, well-known vegetarian restaurant isn’t cheap — but the food’s delicious and the atmosphere chic. The staff’s very accommodating of any and all odd eating requirements and quirks. 1460 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago.

Since I’ve already tried all those spots, I plan to try out these eateries this time around:

Butterfly Social Club. Organic cocktails, from Goji Kombucha Cider to Funky Budda’s Margarita. 726 W. Grand Ave.

Hopleaf Bar. Lotsa beer, organic wine, and organic meat options — plus a nice array of vegetarian dishes to choose from. 5148 N. Clark St.

Lula Cafe.  Seasonal, organic, local produce at a cafe in Logan Square. 2537 N. Kedzie Blvd.

Other non-dining green spots I hope to check out this time around include:

Pivot Boutique: Eco-fashion boutique at 1101 W. Fulton Market.

Working Bikes Co-Op. The kids here fix up donated bikes, donating some to countries where bikes’re scarce and selling others cheaply in its Chicago store. 1125 S. Western Ave.

Parks. 90% of Chicago’s parks are pesticide free, according to Grist. I’ve visited one — Above’s me and my friend Anne under the bean.

Know of other green spots in the Windy City? Share your knowledge in the comments –

BlogHer ’09 happens at the The Chicago Sheraton and Towers from July 24-25, 2009. More importantly — for me, anyway — I’ll be there! And I’ll be on a panel — Leadership: Green and Eco-Blogging — along with Diane MacEachern, author of Big Green Purse which I reviewed here, Jennifer Taggert, and Sommer Poquette. We’ll be discussing this:

A movement is afoot to save the planet, and bloggers across demographic profiles are pitching in. This isn’t only about making personal choices. This isn’t just about paper or plastic. This is about how to be a resource for real change for your readers. And it’s about how to impact companies, organizations and governments to join us to save the world.

Last year I drove a Tahoe hybrid up to San Francisco; this year, I’ll be flying to Chicago again. Looking forward to seeing Britt Bravo, fellow contributing editor at BlogHer, career coach, and my hotel roomie for that weekend.

Update: Will you be at BlogHer? Lemme know — I might throw a party for us.

>> Power To The Gym Rats is my latest article in Whole Life Times — about a Portland gym that powers its grid with the human power expended on its stationary bikes and soon, elliptical machines.

>> 3 Lessons from the Chicago Climate Action Plan. I’m hoping Villaraigosa will pick up some tips from Chicago, which just launched a comprehensive plan to prevent chi-town from feeling like East Texas.

>> Why you hate Palin. “The very thing that appalls us about Sarah Palin — her discomfort in the realm of reason — is her main selling point. This is so mind-boggling that you have to take a minute to let it in. Take a deep breath. Read that sentence again. Face it: Sarah Palin represents what many people want: a retreat from reason; a regression to childhood.”

Thus a list of places I hope to visit next time — which’ll hopefully be helpful to any green LA girl readers planning to travel to Chicago — Feel free to add your eco-recommendation in the comments.

Butterfly Social Club. 726 W. Grand Ave. 312.666.1695. Organic cocktails, from Goji Kombucha Cider to Funky Budda’s Margarita.

Green Zebra. 1460 W. Chicago Ave. 312.243.7100. A higher-end, well-known vegetarian restaurant in Chicago.

Hopleaf Bar. 5148 N. Clark St. 773.334.9851. Lotsa beer, organic wine, and organic meat options — plus a nice array of vegetarian dishes to choose from.

Lula Cafe 2537 N. Kedzie Blvd. 773.489.9554. Seasonal, organic, local produce at a cafe in Logan Square.

Unrelated to food and drinks: The Working Bikes Co-Op sounds like the best place to buy a bike. The kids here fix up donated bikes, donating some to countries where bikes’re scarce and selling others cheaply in its Chicago store. 1125 S. Western Ave. 312.421.5048.

Which meant bloggers got to ask a lot of questions — and got what seemed like very frank answers from Elizabeth.

For ex: One woman — who rambled a bit about how she writes about reclaiming the F word (faith) asked Elizabeth about how her faith impacts her political views.

Elizabeth said that she’s a methodist, but that she doesn’t believe in an intervening god — as in she doesn’t believe in praying to make shit happen (though she didn’t say shit, and she did say she’s appreciative for the people who pray for her). Instead, she believes in a set of general guidelines for living one’s life.

But Elizabeth emphasized that she believes in living according to those guidelines NOT because of the promise of “eternal life” but because “that’s what’s right.”

If Elizabeth’s answer was the answer most religious people gave, I wouldn’t think of religion as such a dogmatic, painful, and generally harmful blight on society.

Elizabeth was careful to separate her own views from her husband’s views — saying that she’d support gay marriage, even while John Edwards only supports civil unions.

And Elizabeth elaborated on her widely-reported comment that John Edwards would do more for women’s issues than Hillary Clinton would. “I just think that we need someone to lead in an aggressive way,” she said, and quickly pointed to “truly universal healthcare.” Saying that Hillary is “not in the right place on this issue,” because “the position she takes is we have cost saving programs” which would reduce cost of insurance and make it more widely available but not actually provide insurance for all. “The national will is here — what we need is leadership,” Elizabeth said, and specifically pointed to the fact that John Edwards has been honest about the fact that there are “sacrifices were going to have to make to get there” — namely raising taxes on those making more than 200K. “I’ve been disappointed that she’s been unwilling to say that,” Elizabeth said about Hillary.

Many of the questions from the general crowd had to do with healthcare and education — from the availability of childcare and elder care to getting young people involved politically. To the former, Elizabeth pointed to importance to making these occupations more attractive via financial incentives; to the latter, she spoke to the importance to making young people feel they aren’t in a vacuum, that they can hear an echo from the work they do.

On media consolidation, Elizabeth said she doesn’t want the Rupert Murdoch “to be the gatekeeper of the information that comes to the American people.” She elaborated later to say that she wasn’t speaking about Murdoch specifically — though she finds him “problematic” — but to the fact that any one person’s voice should be heard so loudly. “I agree with me all the time,” she said jokingly, “and I still don’t think I should be the sieve through which all the information should come to you.”

Then she came and partied with us at the Chicago Children’s Museum, and I got to ask her about her and John’s eco-activism –

It wasn’t a traditional phone card, though it was wallet sized. There were actually a bunch of them, next to a sign encouraging you to take one, with this inscription: “A found photograph opened a new lead. The latest details were left on a voice message at 312.397.3856.”

So take one I did. This card, titled An Expiring ending II, is part of Mario Garcia Torres’s (with Murtaza Roashan) multi-part, multi-medium piece — all based on trying to find a mysterious One Hotel depicted in a photo taken by an artist called Alighiero Boetti back in the 70s.

So I called the number, and got this message:

As you might have imagined, or already know, the film was never shot. Today, the One Hotel building has still not been found. Maybe it was indeed destroyed around 1981, but the story does not end here. The disappearance of the hotel building now has become less important, as the actual existence of it now becomes blurry. The image you are now holding became incredibly important. According to the photographer journalist M… (can’t make out), this image, which was recently seen in his deteriorating archive, was taken sometime between 1973 and 1975, when the One Hotel was supposedly in operation. The hotel was located in a depicted building. If you look closely, you can see the Aziz Supermarket, then the space where the hotel was, and next the pharmacy, both places present in Alighiero’s photo of the hotel. I now wonder if Alighiero went to Kabul later than 1971, as it has been written. Or perhaps it was all a construction of the artist, or maybe the sign on the hotel building was installed later. I’m now as confused as I was when I started looking for the building. In any case, if not photographic documentation, I did talk to someone in the neighborhood who remembered there was some twins that managed the One Hotel. Presently, I still refuse to believe that Alighiero’s story in Kabul never happened.

Then I got back to the net and found this artblog post by libby, who uncannily covered the exact pieces I planned to write about. I mean, the exhibit was a decent size, yet we both took pics and notes on the exact same pieces. Odd –

Thus some of my pics are below, but I encourage you to visit libby’s post for commentary –

Front: Ganz Grosse Geister (Big Spirits XL), Thomas Schutte; back: Short Cut, Michael Elmgreen and Ingmar Dragset.

Front: Abraham Cruz-Villegas, Rond Point; Back: Stefan Bruggemann, Explanations

Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Until September 2, 2007.

I was going to get one of the organic vodka cocktails at Crust, but it was like noon, and I’ve really overdone it on the drinks this weekend, even for me.

So I settled for the organic pinot blanc to go with my “Shrooms” organic pizza — served on a flatbread, which is basically a yum pizza base except, you know, it’s flatbread — with yummy fresh mushrooms, goat cheese, and seasoned spinach.

“Eat Real” is the motto of this certified organic pizzeria — which means 95% of the ingredients used at this eatery are organic. No, it’s not a vegetarian restaurant — but its meats — down to the pork — are organic.

The service was awesome, except when I asked ’bout the desserts, the waiter listed — albeit enthusiastically — only an organic carrot cake and chocolate cake. Um, do you have ice cream? I asked — and he said they did, choco and vanilla.

I said vanilla, but now I’m reading Time Out Chicago and apparently they also have a simple bowl of raspberries for dessert! Crust’s waiters need to not shortchange the dessert menu!

But if I lived in Chicago, I could seriously eat here every day — dessert or no dessert –

Crust. 2056 W. Division St. 773.235.5511.

I don’t know who I’m voting for yet — I have been pretty impressed with John Edwards’ plan re: the environment, but I’ve yet to really compare it to others….

More about Elizabeth’s talk later. I did get to shake her hand, thank her and John for making the environment one of the key issues in the campaign, and asked if the two’d been long-time environmentalists, or newbies to the green movement.

Elizabeth said they hadn’t seen the urgency of the issue until more recently, but that since a few years ago, she and John have been more actively involved. Here’s a recent post she wrote on how her household’s trying to go green.

This all vegetarian, vegan and raw-friendly diner serves fair trade coffee — as well as organic vodka cocktails.

Anne and Kelly aren’t vegan but they really liked their Radical Reuben and Red Pepper Ravioli. My Wilted Spinach Salad was super fresh and yum too –

The vegan chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwich was a bit hard, making it really difficult to split 3 ways, though it was yum once we divided and conquered it.

I took some pics of the food, but those taken without flash’re reddish and dark, and those with are orangey and washed out. I shoulda gone to the Food photography panel at the BlogHer conference –

But to the right’s a pic of the Reuben from The Chicago Diner’s website –

The Chicago Diner. 3411 N. Halsted. 773.935.6696. M – Th 11 am – 10 pm, Fr 11 am – 11 pm, Sa 10 am – 11 am, Su 10 am – 10 pm.