'And What Cause Will You Be Helping Tonight?'
It's getting harder and harder to find a restaurant that caters to my appetite and not my conscience.
(Illustration by Korem Shadmi)It used to be that choosing a restaurant meant finding a place where the cooks prepared delicious well-priced food. You went in, ordered, and, for the time it took to eat, escaped the reality of day-to-day life: Scary conflicts, personal or global, seem less intense when you're enjoying a slice of pizza served by Ralph on a paper plate in view of the Roman gladiators mural at Galleria Umberto in the North End.
But nowadays, restaurants are using politics as a marketing tool to attract like-minded customers. It's not enough for food to taste good.
Want to save the environment? Eat at a "green" restaurant. But who decides what's green and what's not? And what are the scientific standards behind the criteria?
Think that commercial farmers are cruel to animals? Enjoy "free-range" food instead. Too bad the federal guideline on what "free-range" poultry means - poultry that has been allowed access to the outside - is so loose that it's essentially meaningless. Too bad that a free-range chicken can be slaughtered inhumanely.
Worried about Africa? You could have stopped by one of the many local restaurants that participated in the UNICEF-sponsored "Tap Project," its worldwide clean-water effort. Over one week last month, for every glass of tap water customers drank, the participating restaurant "invited" them to donate $1 to UNICEF.
"For every dollar raised, a child will have clean drinking water for 40 days," reads the UNICEF mission statement. Whew, glad we got that taken care of. Say, isn't this humanely raised braised veal shoulder yummy? But for the $39 spent for that one portion of veal, we could have given a child in Angola clean water for 1,560 days.
In Cambridge, we have Clear Conscience Cafe, in Central Square, which was opened in October by Daniel Goldstein and Jack Kutner, two entrepreneurs who left 10-year careers in financial services. Here waitstaff , hired under the title of "environmental stewards," serve coffee and tea (which are all organic), as well as pastries (which are not).
What's in a name? The starting pay for "environmental stewards" at Clear Conscience Cafe is $9 an hour and can go up to $13 an hour - $9 is a buck above the state hourly minimum wage. Can you have a clear conscience paying an employee about $360 for a 40-hour week? Where can that "environmental steward" live and eat on a salary of less than $19,000?
In order to differentiate themselves in the highly competitive hospitality industry, restaurants are supporting the same causes as their targeted customer base. It's a business plan, pure and simple. Ideology = profit.
You think that walking down the street to
But the use of politics to market a restaurant is more than just a cynical, profit-driven tool. It's also elitist.
Restaurants have always been the perfect business opportunity for immigrants and the poor, who are often relatively uneducated and not connected to real sources of power, like a business school. Generations of Chinese, Jews, African-Americans, West Indians, Greeks, Indians, Latin Americans, Arabs, Italians, and Vietnamese have served traditional food and secured a foothold and future for their families in this country through their restaurants. Now they have to be green, too?
You won't see the best restaurants in Chinatown renaming themselves Clear Conscience Peach Farm. Folks are too busy making fresh dumplings to feel guilty.
Do you really want to save the environment and have a clear conscience? Then don't use fossil fuels to drive to a restaurant and spend money on yourself. Politics starts at home: Make a salad of local organic produce, open a bottle of biodynamic wine, eat a plate of sustainable fish, and with the money you save from not eating out, write a big check to UNICEF.
Scott Haas is a freelance writer in Cambridge. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
