As a daytime Downtowner, I frequently find myself wandering the bricks in search of a noonday meal. There are plenty of options, and as I walk I mostly listen to my appetite to figure out where to go. I’ll pay for my meal, walk it back to my desk, and eat while I read or write emails. And 20 minutes later, I’ll have some new garbage in my life.
Like anything else, lunch is an opportunity to embrace or ignore green concerns, and that’s true on at least two fronts. One, of course, is the food: Is it organic? Is it local? The other is what that food is served on. If you’re taking it to go, your lunch is going to result in at least a small amount of waste. So what if I chose my lunch spot not based on food but on packaging? Find out below…
Not a bad choice: salad in a biodegradable container from Blue Ridge Country Store, a fork from home, and no bags or napkins.
Oddly, some of the more organic- and local-focused restaurants wouldn’t stack up so well on the packaging side. Revolutionary Soup makes great stuff with local heirloom ingredients, but serves it in cardboard cups, brown bags and a square of paper used to grab your roll. If you don’t have silverware back at your desk, you’ll also need a plastic spoon, and a plastic knife if you butter your roll.
Some of the best Downtown options I can think of: Christian’s Pizza, which earns you a simple cardboard box (recyclable, I think) and no silverware. The salad bar at Blue Ridge Country Store, if you use the clamshell containers that can be composted or recycled. Just Curry serves their stuff in plastic, true, but their containers are sturdy enough to reuse in your kitchen at home, so if it keeps you from buying tupperware it kind of evens out.
None of these are perfect solutions. I try to refuse plastic bags, keep my own silverware at work and recycle what I can, but it’s still tough to go waste-free unless I bring all my own lunches from home. And I haven’t even mentioned napkins. Good God, the abandon with which people go through napkins! Are we infants, with cereal all over our fronts?
What’s your nomination for the greenest takeout packaging in town? Anybody going so far as to show up at Eppie’s with their own containers and forks?
