Eating an eco-friendly diet can seem a daunting chore if you go about it the hard way: grow your own garden fed by your own home compost, balance precarious loads of seasonal produce while bicycling back from the farmers’ market, track down heirloom turkeys grown free range by an old school neighborhood farmer who doesn’t have a website, let alone email.
Yes, I’m exaggerating — Biking to my farmers’ market’s a fun ride, and all sorts of organic, free range meats are ready available there — but eating local on Earth Day’s now as simple as dining out, thanks to Bon Appetit Management. The eco-conscious company’s got many of its restaurants across the nation serving low carbon menus on April 22, a day that’s both Earth Day and Low Carbon Diet Day.
The Getty Center cafe will be serving a mouthwatering low carbon menu, just like during the company’s Eat Local Challenge. check out the dishes above. Other participating restaurants include:
>> The Modern Art Museum in Ft. Worth, TX
>> The Minnesota History Center in St. Paul, MN
>> The Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, CA
>> AmTrust in Cleveland, OH
Don’t live anywhere near those? You can participate in Low Carbon Diet Day by calculating your own diet’s impact on the Eat Low Carbon Diet Calculator, or test your eco-foodie smarts by taking the Low Carbon Diet Quiz on Facebook (I scored an 80%). Then get to work on those biking-while-balancing-farmers-market-produce skills –
Images via Bon Appetit
I have heard that a study was done that says local, organic poultry actually has a larger carbon footprint than conventional factory-farmed birds because, without the added hormones and unnatural diet, they take longer to reach maturity. This requires more food, and therefore more fertilizers to grow the food, and possibly some other stuff I’m missing. I don’t know. But that’s why I don’t eat meat. :-)
Comment by Meredith — April 17, 2009 @ 1:10 pm