Healthier Dining
Editor’s Note: The OC Voice only reviews restaurants that offer complete or substantial vegetarian or vegan menus.
Saving the Earth One Mouthful at a Time
By David L. M. Preston
OC Voice Staff Writer
In honor of the OC Voice’s first “green” issue the food section is going to provide a general overview of local restaurants and markets that have a green tilt to them, rather than a straight review. There’s too many to choose from to single it out in one edition, but to start off we provide what we think is a good sampling of the wonderful food available in the area, by businesses that are also earth friendly.
Going green can mean going to greens. ‘Greens’ as in vegetables. While vegetarianism or veganism isn’t for everyone, the fact is the carbon-footprint, on average, of plant-based food production is much less than that of meat and dairy production. Animals such as pigs and cows convert grain into meat with a huge loss of energy transfer. (Think of 100 pounds of wheat and how much bread that can make, as opposed to how much a herd animals needs to eat over its lifetime before a pound of meat is produced.) And this, of course, doesn’t factor in processing, packaging and transportation energy usage as costs.
Take a minute and even calculate how you can affect your own carbon-footprint by changing your food purchases and diet with any one of many numerous ‘carbon calculators’ available online. We recommend the very thorough ‘Food Carbon Footprint Calculator’ at www.foodcarbon.co.uk.
Earth friendly vegetarian foods are also packaged and processed, but the intermediary of energy loss (animal feed, and their biological processes making cells that make the meat) is overall much less. Customers can also lower produce transportation costs by buying locally grown products, which are often fresher, healthier and supports local economies. The future trend will be decentralization, for energy production, food production, etc., for our species to affect large-scale climate change, so why not make your own efforts to help…and make it delicious and healthy to boot.
Huntington Beach
Bodhi Tree Vegetarian Café
(Reviewed in the OC Voice May 2007 edition.)
The Bodhi Tree is a comfortable venue for a downtown sit-down meal with a Chinese-Vietnamese flair to it’s totally veggie food. Dishes are made for every “meat” taste, (seafood, poultry, etc.) without any animal products being used. Soybean-curds galore, but in a variety of presentations and flavors. Extra yummy with an Asian style. Closed Tuesdays.
501 Main St, Huntington Beach
(714) 969-9500
Good-to-Go
Though a small vegetarian restaurant Good-to-Go, at the former site of the sadly defunct gourmet vegan restaurant Good Mood Food Café (which the OC Voice reviewed in June 2007), its founders have big goals. Sheevaun Moran and Darlene Baerg are hoping to make Good-to-Go the first “healthy fast food restaurant chain,” according to their mission statement on the restaurant’s website (www.goodtogorestaurants.com). The menu ranges from fresh almond milk, fruits and vegetables, Power Green smoothies, Brazil Nut veggie burgers and portabella mushroom pizzas. Though not yet reviewed by the OC Voice it sounds wonderful. Drive-through vegetarian food? Intriguing. We wish them luck, and hope they include a bike-through lane.
5930 Warner Ave, Huntington Beach
(714) 840-6400
Mother’s Market & Kitchen
Yes, Trader Joe’s is definitely a step up from the Ralph’s and the Albertsons of the world, but Mother’s Market (with locations in both Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa, nearby; and if you’d like a little jaunt, Irvine and Laguna Woods as well) is special. With every organic product you can think of, and more than a number that you couldn’t, it is the next-best-thing to a Farmer’s market. Fresh fruits and vegetables, wholesome cereals and bulk grains and nuts fill the store. It’s difficult to know where to begin, and should be visited and experienced for yourself. The Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach stores have wonderful sit-down kitchen/coffee/café shops, to provide a nice oasis for those of us who cringe at even the mention of Starbucks. The market is an underutilized resource for fresher foodstuffs in our area. Remember, less processing, less energy waste.
19770 Beach Blvd., Huntington Beach
225 E. 17th St., Costa Mesa
2963 Michelson Drive, Irvine
24165 Paseo de Valencia Laguna Woods
Costa Mesa
Avanti Café
Executive chefs Tanya Fuqua and Mark Cleveland man the helm of this “Flavorfully Organic, Handcrafted Food” café. Featuring organic dishes such as shittake pesto artichoke pizzettes, falafel roasted eggplant, and lemon-oil scented roasted polenta crisps, it’s eating healthily with class. It also has extensive tea and wine lists to peruse.
259 E. 17th St., Costa Mesa, CA
(949) 548-2224
118 Degrees: Raw Food Cuisine
A hip lounge, overviewed by Chef Jenny Ross, that focuses on raw foods (the 118 in the title is the hottest temperature a food can be before it is counted as “cooked” and so is to be avoided) located in the CAMP, it’s a nice change of pace if you’re tired from fried tofu. From a carbon-footprint point of view, raw foods use even less energy than cooked, though that isn’t the main argument for raw foodism. That aside, a large variety of foods are best when uncooked. Chocolate ganache, fresh juice mixes (apple-lemon-ginger juice for example), and a garden tahini roll, (made up of a flax wrap, marinated carrots, zucchini and kale) are some of this restaurants offerings.
2981 Bristol, Suite B5, Costa Mesa
Native Foods
(Reviewed in the OC Voice May 2008 edition.)
Just reviewed last month (check it out online!) this restaurant is friendly, soothing and really a wonderful vegetarian-vegan stop. From their “Save-the-chicken” wings to Bali-tempeh burgers and homemade chai, it’s high on the recommendation list. Great spot for families, or to just sit and chat.
2937 Bristol St, Costa Mesa
(714) 751-2151
Organic To Go
Have had more than one office lunch catered by Organic To Go, I recommend it highly, though it is not solely vegetarian/vegan, and does have organic meat products. According to its website (it is a growing chain) Organic To Go has outlets in Los Angeles, Seattle, San Diego and here in Orange County. It is more of a caterer than a walk-in place, so might be a good options for your next business lunch. The claim is that it was “…the first, USDA certified organic fast-casual cafe and corporate catering company” and that “Each product offered…has been carefully reviewed to meet the company’s exacting standards to ensure a pesticide, hormone and chemical free dining experience that will help to ensure the sustainability of our environment for generations.” They use locally raised ingredients too. Cheers to that!
695 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, CA 92626
1-800-304-4550
Farmer’s Markets
Rather than go out to eat why not cook yourself? And the best way to minimize carbon and energy loads is to buy locally and use locally. Farmer’s Markets are a great way to do that, and there are many to choose from. The main for the Costa Mesa / Huntington Beach area is, of course, the Farmer’s Market at the OC Fairgrounds. Local producers from all around bring the freshest produce and products, and tend to sell at a very fair price. With rising food prices the growth of these markets should increase, as it cuts out the middle-men of corporate-owned grocery chains. And heck, the food tends to taste better too!
Orange County Fair & Expo Center
88 Fair Dr, Costa Mesa
(714) 573-0374
Food Choices Affect Global Warming as Much as Driving Choices
By OC Voice Staff
Unless you are a hunter-gatherer, most food Americans eat contributes to global warming. A United Nations report concluded that the livestock sector is responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Geophysicists Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin at the University of Chicago compared the total greenhouse gas emissions of animal and plant-based diets and found that a person eating a vegetarian diet contributes about 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents less per year than someone consuming the same number of calories from a typical American diet of 28 percent animal sources.
A meatless diet can reduce your carbon footprint more than switching to a hybrid.
But growing crops that vegetarians eat also has its problems, in large part because of the oil based fertilizers needed to restore crop land that has eroded due to over farming, as well as the fossil fuels used in transporting grain, most of which is fed to livestock.
“[F]ood is oil,” as journalist Richard Manning wrote, in a stomach turning expose in Harper’s magazine (“The Oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq, 2004). “Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1.”
If everybody in the world ate like Americans, according to a Cornell University food expert Manning interviewed, the world’s fossil fuel reserves would be gone in 7 years.
Food processing converts still more energy into carbon dioxide. Breakfast cereal, for example, is ground, milled, wetted, dried and baked, then packaged. That requires 4 calories for each calorie of cereal produced. As a whole, food processing in the United States consumes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy for each calorie of food it produces. Meat production is the worst, taking 35 calories of fossil fuel to make one calorie of beef. It takes 68 calories to make 1 calorie of pork.
Recently my wife & I dined again at Bravo Avo, located on the northeast corner of Warner & Gothard. I had the Avo’s Complete Dinner vegetarian combo, and my wife had the chicken kabob. It was all very good as usual. I think Bravo Avo has the best pita bread in all of HB.
Bravo Avo has some special events coming up:
Monday, March 31st, from 5:30PM to 8:30PM, spend an intimate evening dining with your host Avo. A four course meal will be served, including three glasses of wine, appetizer, salad, choice of two special entrees not on the regular menu, plus dessert, all for $40 per person. Limited seating; reservations required. This event is listed on their web site at http://www.bravoavo.com
Then on Monday, April 28th, a similar meal will be served, but with the addition of belly dancing entertainment. This one will be $55 per person.
Their regular dinner entrees are all about $15, plus or minus.
Bravo Avo is a great little Mediterranean cuisine restaurant that could use more customers. My wife and I were the only patrons dining there tonight from 6-7PM. Give ‘em a try; you’ll be glad you did.