Don’t Claim to Be Green When You’re Red

To preface this, I don’t mean that if you are a Republican you can’t be green—though, obviously, there are more green folks on the left than the right. What I mean is if you profess to have such high eco-friendly standards, you shouldn’t be serving stuff like red meat, bottled water, and bulls*** on your menu. It makes people who do strive to be green see red.

I was reading about a restaurant in St. Louis that professed to be one of the first “green restaurants” in the Midwest. Intrigued, I checked out the menu—only to find that more than half of it contained meat items, as well as bottled water. It even had hotdogs on the menu. Hotdogs, really?

I would think that if a restaurant were truly to “go green,” it would feature alternatives to meat—or none at all. Products made with soy not only taste comparable (if not better), they are more sustainable and ethical to produce and eat. Claiming that your restaurant is green while you promote thousands of gallons of water, land waste, harsh emissions, and animal cruelty just shouldn’t be cutting it this late in the game. Years ago when it was just starting to become “cool” to go green, it might have been acceptable; today we pretty much know better and should be going green not because it’s trendy or because we think it’s the right thing to do, but because we pretty much have to if we want the world we know to continue to exist for our children and theirs.

We can do better. And while I applaud this restaurant’s efforts to recycle, use sustainable containers, and other actions it has taken to reduce its ecological footprint, I still maintain that it is far from enough. All restaurants, stores, and companies should be doing this as a mandatory procedure rather than an optional one. And while I know I can’t dictate how or what people eat, we should be able to pass legislation about the containers used for such foods, the ways those foods are raised and shipped, and so many other issues surrounding our wasteful system. I know that many individual places have started programs that help to eliminate waste—such as bans on plastic bags or Styrofoam containers—and it’s time that the whole nation take a stand together and make these country-wide measures.

I vow today to write my mayor and ask that our city start an initiative to ban plastic bags, just to start. From there, who knows? Please consider joining me in making your community more sustainable as well.