Toss those trays

College foodservice is often the incubator for trends that eventually spread into the restaurant mainstream. If that tradition holds true, get ready for two changes in the business: The end of the restaurant tray, and the emergence of a new foodservice position called “the forager.”

Dennis Pierce, the diretor of dining services for the University of Connecticut, provided a preview of both changes during the Food Safety Symposium on Sunday (see earlier posts for some context).

The forager, he explained, is a position that’s arising as a result of interest in procuring local produce and ingredients. “It’s someone who has a culinary background, as well as a procurement background,” said Pierce.

Because localized purchasing can require menu re-engineering, he continued, restaurants will need someone with the ability to adjust recipes or tweak the bill of fare as supplies change with the growing seasons. But at the same time, he noted, that person has to know how to adjudge how much of a local item will be needed, and where to get it a feasible price.

Pierce cited the hypothetical example of adding locally grown garlic. The forager would have to know what's needed, in terms of volume, and how to get it.

The other trend, he said, is already well underway in college dining. “If you’ve not heard about this,” he said, “you will. It’s trayless dining.”

He recounted how Middlebury College had eliminated trays from its feeding facilities as a way of saving water in its cleaning operations. That prompted UConn to give it a try last semester. For a week, two dining facilities operated as usual, but with Pierce and his team studying and apparently benchmarking certain variables. The next week, they educated the students about such issues as water conservation. The third week, they stopped using trays.

“We discovered that we had 900 lbs. less of food waste and saved 2,000 gallons of water,” he said.

That prompted the school to pull trays this semester from dining facilities that cater to freshmen, since they’ve not yet been accustomed to using trays.

Pierce also described the college’s newest sustainable venture, the use of a “pulper” to convert food waste into compost material, which the school plans to sell. The waste is pulverized and dumped into a bin, which is then heated. It apparently consolidates into what looks like dirt.

He also recounted the school's experiences with bee hives. It's already put in 10 hives, and is harvesting hundreds of pounds of honey. Ten more are coming. UConn plans not only to use the honey as a sweetener, but also to sell it in convenience stores.

Carbon footprints on restaurateurs’ backs

This just in from the Wile E. Coyote Falling Anvil Alert Service: Stay inside. The well-intentioned forces that hope to make the world a better place for chipmunks and koala bears are about to drop some serious (and no doubt recycled) iron on the restaurant industry.

You might even spot some casual-dining operators atop the cliff with them, though they could end up victims as much as supporters. Their curbside takeaway business would no doubt benefit if the ecologically-minded put the brakes on quick-service drive-thrus, as a number of activists are already vowing because of pollution concerns. The proponents of bans on drive-thrus or car idling could probably live with casual dining’s system of running an order out to patrons’ SUVs or hybrids as soon as they pull into designated parking spots.

It’s the drive-thru that has the Dark Greens stomping their Birkenstocks. Isn’t wasteful idling as much a part of that experience as yelling into a microphone? And isn’t that both contributing to global warming and wasting precious gas? Why not ban it?

And that’s exactly what Minneapolis did a little over two weeks ago. Cars that sit still outside of traffic for more than three minutes have to shut down their engines or risk getting ticketed.

Other areas, like Madison, Wis., are weighing the possibility of banning new drive-thrus. And interest in that method of cutting auto emissions is approaching a national crusade in Canada, with at least nine major cities considering a prohibition on the drive-up.

But the casual restaurant operators may soon have their own sustainable fish to fry. Conservationists hoping to stigmatize bottled water on ecological grounds succeeded last week in recruiting the Klingon Empire to their cause. After hearing that San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom had outlawed his city’s purchase of bottled water, the U.S. Conference of Mayors passed a resolution that obliges the 250 members to look into a similar rule within their respective jurisdictions. Already, the tribal leaders of Ann Arbor, Mich., have agreed not to allow bottled water to be served at city events.

So far, restaurants have only been pressured by the pro-tap forces to stop selling bottled water, instead of being forced by law. But certainly that insistence they forego the high-margin item is going to grow much, much stronger. Indeed, the industry is even hearing it from its own members. At the trade’s big convention last month in Chicago, some attendees groused that the panel of speakers at one event was provided with single-serving bottles of water, instead of a pitcher and glasses. It probably didn’t help that the green movement was going to be one of the topics discussed.

So what’s an industry to do? For one thing, catch up with Road Runner of public opinion. When I mention the possibility of a drive-thru or idling ban, restaurateurs always shoot me that same look they’d direct at a deranged street person. It reminds me of the bemused look they used to get when the topic of menu labeling came up at the beginning of the decade.

Secondly, the debates have largely been waged thus far on the basis of emotion, not fact. How much pollution do cars in a drive-thru actually contribute, and how does that compare with the emissions generated by parking, or stopping and starting the engine?

And what is the carbon glass print, so to speak, for water that comes from a bottle rather than a tap? How much energy is needed to wash pitchers or glasses for the stuff that comes out of a pipe in the kitchen? And how much of an impact did that pipe have? What about the effect on reservoirs that have already dwindled below the high-water mark?

Some hardcore research is clearly needed. Just try to avoid a provider that goes by the name of Acme. Its products have proven time and again to be ineffective, especially if they have a fuse.

Lucca II: A few words about green toilets

Green has been a concern for so long in Europe that it may be showing a little gray. Conservation seems to be a standard operating procedure, even in a city steeped in antiquity, like Lucca, Italy. The evidence can be as close as the nearest bathroom.

Toilets like the ones in our hotel, the San Luca Palace, have a nifty feature that must save a considerable amount of water. The flush mechanism is a two-piece touch plate on the wall. One piece is a smaller oval inset into a larger one. No instructions are given, but when you stop and wonder why the device has two components, the intent becomes apparent quickly: Touch the small oval for a lighter flush. For, um, tougher jobs where more water and flush power are needed, touch the larger part of the plate.

Here's what it looks like:


Bathrooms are not the only component of hotels and restaurants to be retrofitted with high-tech features for the sake of conservation. The hotel where we’re staying, for instance, features an impressive electricity-saving measure. When you enter a guest room, some lights will go on. If you put the card key into a slot by the door, they’ll stay on after the door closes, and you can of course turn on others, or snap on the TV. If the card key is not in the slot when the door closes, all the electricity shuts off. That, of course, means all lights will go off when the guest leaves the room with card key in hand. It’s nearly a failsafe way of guaranteeing the patron snaps off the power when he or she doesn’t need it.

What's in Ted's garage--and hangar

It’s fitting on tax day that we remember what the titans of industry are driving these days. Take Ted Turner, for instance. The media-mogul-turned-rancher-turned-restaurateur (he’s a principal in Ted’s Montana Grill, the 55-unit bison chain) cleared up the mystery during a presentation in New York last week. “I drive a Prius, that’s my primary car,” the billionaire explained during the “green tour” he and Ted’s CEO George McKerrow, Jr., are currently undertaking to raise ecological awareness within the restaurant business.

The revelation about Ted’s wheels drew some guffaws and murmurs from the audience. This, after all, is a guy who could probably buy Ford or GM, never mind a Rolls, Bentley or Maybach.

“What’s wrong with that?” he challenged the audience when it mumbled about his choice of car.

“So what do you think when you see a Humvee on the road?” asked Deborah Roberts, the ABC News personality who moderated the appearance by Turner and McKerrow.

“Well, I have one Humvee, but I only use it for quail hunting in New Mexico,” he admitted.

Turner also revealed that he takes a cloth bag with him when he shops, so he doesn’t have to get a new plastic or paper one from the store. He also recounted how he’ll pick up litter, both in Georgia, where he sponsors the clean-up of some highways, and outside of the Ted’s unit in midtown Manhattan.

“I’ll pick up a couple pieces of trash if someone’s looking because that has double the impact,” he said. “Someone’ll say, ‘If Ted Turner can pick up trash, so can I.’”

He even noted that he’s mindful of waste when he travels. Other billionaires are buying airliner-sized craft and converting them into private planes. His plane is merely moderate in size, Turner assured what seemed like a decidedly pro-green audience.

Turner is not the only mega-rich person in the restaurant business to drive a Prius, by any stretch. A few years ago, after an industry dinner in Dallas, Norman Brinker and his wife, Toni, waited outside for the valets to bring around their ride. They, too, drove a hybrid.

Off your chest

I was polishing my Olympics medals when the President called to let me know that two more best-selling authors had just admitted they'd bent the facts of their blockbuster non-fiction works. If I hadn’t been for my C.I.A. training to withstand shock, I would’ve toppled for sure into the Pope, who had popped over for lunch with Angelina Jolie and me (he loves those pizzas I developed for Wolfgang Puck). But it only got worse: The New York Times reported this morning that restaurateur Robert Irvine was replaced as host of a Food Network show because of acknowledged exaggerations on his resume, like claims he’d been knighted and counted Prince Charles among his buds.

At least all three of the truth stretchers admitted their fudging, obviously hoping that confession truly is good for the soul. It would only be appropriate that we keep the good karma building by making a few candid admissions here on the part of the industry:

• Twelve or 14 dollars for a glass of wine should only be collected by servers wearing bandanas over their faces, a la Butch Cassidy. Unless the bottle wholesales for a few hundred dollars, there’s no way a wine should be priced that high, especially in a casual place.

• Restaurant groups named after a famous chef often only see their namesake at the Christmas party.

• Part of casual dining’s current woes is the lousy food that’s offered by even some of the most respected players. The sector seems to be suffering the same inertia in that regard that tripped up the big quick-service chains before they realized a frozen hockey puck of ground beef might not be that appealing to a public that spends its leisure time watching the Food Network. The segment needs to shake out of its lethargy and catch up with the higher standards of the times.

• Bio-diesel fuel, though a smart re-use of something that might otherwise end up in refuse pits, is not as green as the industry suggests. It’s not the cleanest-burning fuel available, and, thought it minutely lessens our reliance on imported oil, it’s not as much of an eco-boon as some of the publicity suggests.