More thoughts.

I was brought up in my public schools, good ones, to be cognizant of the environment. We learned about recycling, reducing our waste, etc. and the narrative of our generation was that we were the ones to issue change in the world in regards to how we treated our planet…Yes, this was Vermont…Fast forward 30 years…It seems as if things have gotten worse. My own household generates a ton of trash, my country barely recycles. Most states don’t even have redemption for soda and beer cans. I read somewhere that 96% of the recycling just goes into the trash anyway. Ugh. The future, predicted by the post apocalyptic Pixar picture, Wall-E, is coming true.

Saving a few peels and seeds here and there behind the bar isn’t going to change anything. Yeah, that sounds pretty negative. We do have our own philosophy on waste, but our food waste goes into compost, so there’s no real need to save anything really. The bigger thing to do would be to create less waste overall in the restaurant but goddam if restaurants are just generators of mega amounts of trash, and waste water like nothing else. Most restaurants (not Rustic) scour the seas and oceans for the fish they need. They buy and therefore contribute to the massive pork, beef, and chicken farms that destroy environments and drinking water.

Not to be a downer here, but it just doesn’t seem like it’s going to change anytime soon. Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma was published 16 years ago now (2007). Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was about the same amount of time ago, in 2006. It’s not just about climate change, it’s about the insane amount of waste we produce just due to our lifestyles. Shit, behind the bar I throw out hundreds of glass bottles per week, most of which could easily have wine, whiskey, gin, rum, etc. simply poured back into them. Instead of buying things from physical stores now, it’s much easier to just one click and have it delivered the next day, but even that creates lots of waste. Usually, if I’m out and I buy a book I don’t need a bag to carry it, a box to put it in, or lots of plastic air filled barriers to keep it from jostling around.

I don’t know. I always envisioned something a bit more like Japan or Germany with less waste, more recycling options, just less trash in general. I think the problem is that everyone is just exhausted and no one wants to deal with so much extra work like bringing tupperware to the grocery store for their chicken breasts. Half the time we don’t even think about any of this…Except when I launch a big old bag of trash down the chute every couple of days. Where does it all go? Just how much garbage does a crazy place like Los Angeles generate? It must be a lot. There must be a megalopolis somewhere with all of this unbiodegradable crap.

Well, I did some of the work. Apparently it goes to the Calabasas Landfill. Ha. I had no idea the residence of the Kardashians and many other soulless celebs sat on or near all of our trash. Somehow that feels good.

Anyway…Deep thoughts for the day. In Spain, if you order wine, the server goes and fills a bottle from a barrel on the wall. We could do this with liquor, no? Our selections would be much less limited but there would be way less waste. Yes to kegs, no to bottles. That’s about it. We try our best with the produce but it’s really the least of concerns. Here’s the problem, all of this costs money. A decent water filtration system, a station for making sparkling water, buying wine barrels (which I’m not even sure is a thing here), installing keg taps again (we have no room anywhere behind the bar for them), a shelving system of some sort for all these heavy ass barrels and jugs full of various booze that probably don’t even exist in the first place anyway. Yes, it would be a better, less wasteful existence but everyone would have to agree to do it. All those bottling jobs would be lost, yada, yada, so on and so forth. I guess we’re all just fucked…Maybe I’ve just watched Wall-E one too many times (like 350) with my crazy toddler…