Ok, I have just finished reading Thomas L. Friedman’s latest book; Hot, Flat and Crowded. The book got me really thinking, and I find myself looking at way of being ‘green’. I attended a workshop at a five star hotel in Johannesburg recently, and couldn’t stand how my fellow attendees would request the aircon to be turned up and down every hour. I suggested we simply open and close one of the doors to regulate the heat. It worked, I smiled.
Besides being the right thing to do, going green can also have financial benefits. Let’s look at the blog’s area of interest: food. The most obvious one is going organic. You save a fortune in chemicals, etc. and organic produce fetches a premium. If only they could relax the requirements for a farm to be certified organic. That would definitely better the lives of many African farmers. My dad used to drive to surrounding rural areas, and get kraal manure for our garden. To this day, our garden remains chemical free. The ‘green gold’ that grows wildly in some patches is testimony to this.
What can restaurants do to help the green revolution? Firstly, they can operate smart. Do we really need restaurants to open from 10h00 till 22h00? Lets be honest, no one on a Tuesday morning is going to order a T-bone steak and onion rings, unless they went out the night before. This is what I would do if I were a restaurateur. Let’s assume I own a steak house. I would open for lunch and dinner only. This way I don’t have to keep my grills on the whole day. My lunch menu would be smaller meals, which are fairly quickly to make. Offer salads and stir fried veggies instead of starch that takes longer to cook. If I have stews as part of the menu, these would be prepared in the early morning.
I would also encourage other restaurants to follow suit. I would tell the pizzeria next door, that chances of people having pizza before sunset on a weekday are pretty slim. They are better off opening at 15h30, incase some people decide to leave work early. The deli selling gourmet Italian breakfasts and sandwiches should close by 17h00.
The’ less is more’ maxim is also part of operating smart. How many times have you sprained your wrist trying to hold and page through the monstrous menu. I now wonder how many trees it takes to produce the paper in some of these menus. A board against the wall, or go techno and have a flat screen TV (sola powered of course) displaying your menu. Keep your menu items as few as possible, and change the menu every few months based on availability of produce.
If you take one of these fifteen page menus, walk to the kitchen and ask the chef when he last prepared the beef stroganoff on page 8, he would in all probability shrug his shoulders. But the fridge has to carry the ingredients, in case someone feels like a stroganoff. Think of the place that offers ice cream in the middle of winter. The freezer is packed with ice cream tubs that will have to be eaten by the staff.
Through analysis of patron patterns and having suppliers in close proximity, a restaurateur can keep his stock to an absolute minimum. This can easily translate to fresher produce.
There, I challenge restaurants to develop and implement a ‘green programme’ and lets see how that goes.
