The Sweet Smell of Environmental Progress

Clan See-Dub piled into the family truckster and went for a drive in the country today. Beautiful scenery, winding roads, blessedly little traffic. We stopped for lunch in a fairly isolated little logging town, one with some 19th-century buildings downtown. This being NorCal, of course, the small-town rural charm was suffused with the Birkenstock culture; there was a yoga center on the tiny main street, a few doors down from the Celtic D&D crap/ crystal-healing/ witchcraft-paraphernalia shop.

We went into a large brew-pub and sprawled in a booth. The beer was outstanding, the burgers delicious (the onion rings and burger buns, like the beer, were made right on the premises.) But one way-odd thing jumped out at Mrs. See-Dub and me: the menu.

It was full of preachy little items between the dishes, bragging about how environmentally-friendly the brew-pub was. They had cut out partially hydrogenated oils, which is fine, and they'd converted the pub truck to run on used vegetable grease from their fryers--though not without some "challenges", they noted archly.

But what got us was a tiny blurb, repeated in excruciating, expanded detail on the back, about the expensive new septic system the restaurant had installed. Average restaurant effluent, they told us, was in the range of 150-300 parts per million, but this whiz-bang new system had dropped theirs down to 18 PPM and the effluent appeared clear if you looked at in a glass. All this right there in the menu, so as you were anticipating your meal you got to ponder the benefits of bio-activated septic systems and restaurant grease-trap effluent.

And among those benefits, the menu told us, was that because the new eco-happy septic tank was working a little too well, the restaurant had been warned that there were going to be some "odor issues" for a while, but that would eventually go away. Both of us had seen Michelle's riff on environmentalists' disturbing candor about their weird relationship with poop the day before, so we just about lost it as I read that part aloud in my best extremely serious Algore voice.

P.S. speaking of extremely serious voices and Green derangement, check out the great voiceover work on this outstanding HamNation educational film. I'm having trouble with permalinks to Mary Katharine's blog, so if that doesn't work for you, try YouTube.