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Untitled Document
| How eating Red China's food will make you Green |
The Editor: Robert Plotkin
2007-07-12 |
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There are few things worth a two-hour drive over the hill and back. One of them is ethnic food. I like that twang on my tongue and have always preferred the bite of wasabi to the balm of mayonnaise. But now a bright red box truck parked next to the Western Saloon serves Szuchuan from a finely polished, metal sideflap. This improbable contraption, with burners fired by kerosene, is on a scale much different from a hot dog stand in New York, or even a lunch truck serving packaged sandwiches. It is a kitchen on wheels, and its grunts and gasses, the opening and closing of its flaps, the lumbering movement, give it the aspect of a fat Chinese dragon. What next, a blimp that dispenses sushi from a zipline, or a drive-in that projects against clouds?
And I want you to eat from it with the same sense of self-congratulation as a Prius driver. For the Chinese Chuckwagon could keep 17,831,563 pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. If you drive a pickup truck ( 1.03 pounds of CO2 per mile) from Point Reyes Station to Chinatown (77.2 miles) once a week, you will put an amazing 4147 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere to get your weekly Szuchuan. If only one member of each household that reads the Point Reyes Light (4300) made a similar trip over the hill for ethnic food, it ads up to 17 million, 831 thousand, 563 pounds of CO2.
Whenever I ask restaurateurs why they don’t open a Thai, or Indian restaurant, they say that the economics don’t support it; that there is not a big enough local market. So I propose a non-profit complex, supported by the Marin Community Foundation, located in the now appropriately named Green Barn, housing a Sushi Bar, an Indian restaurant and a large screen movie theatre. This would save me at least two trips over-the-hill per week. And if only a third of West Marin’s population did likewise it could keep at least 35 million pounds of C02 a year from entering the atmosphere, where it will cause apocalyptic warming. This dark alchemy must be stopped. And if doing so requires me to eat tandori chicken or watch the “Bourne Ultimatum” in a stadium seat, then so be it. I am willing to make that sacrifice.
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