Thursday, January 30, 2020

Carbon Footprint Madness: Kaiser Rolls Edition

Kaiser rolls at a 1760 court banquet
The concern about carbon footprints, despite shaky science, appears to have infected a good chunk of Americans.

I mean there must be people walking around actually thinking about their personal carbon footprint.

Which brings me to a review of a new sandwich shop in booming downtown Oakland, which is just on the other side of San Francisco across the East Bay ( a 12-minute BART ride).

The shop, Binney Park, was recently reviewed in the East Bay Express.

It was a decent and thorough review, 19 paragraphs long.

Early in the review, the writer reported:
At Binney Park, [Chris]Silverman is inspired by sandwiches from his childhood. An East Coast sandwich, according to Silverman, should have quality, straightforward ingredients — nothing funky or out of the ordinary. Most ingredients at Binney Park are locally sourced — the meat comes from Zoe's Meat in Petaluma, and most of the bread comes from The Acme Bread Company and Le Boulanger.

But for the kaiser roll that Silverman felt was essential to his New York breakfast sandwich, Bay Area versions simply wouldn't do. Instead, he turned to his favorite New York bakery and convinced the unidentified bakery to ship their bread to California.
I read the full review, I am looking for a good sandwich shop in Oakland.

This stunned me at the bottom of the review:
 For me, a Binney Park sandwich seems like a worthwhile occasional indulgence — because, let's face it, for the sake of minimizing our carbon footprint, we probably shouldn't be eating kaiser rolls shipped from New York on a regular basis.
The carbon footprint of a single kaiser roll?

These people need to grab a breakfast bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich on a kaiser roll and watch this commentary by Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist,  professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institue of Technology, who was the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT.



-RW



2 comments:

  1. Spending time with family over the holidays, my exceedingly bright high-school aged nephew mentioned he wasn't eating meat (fish excepted) to "minimize my carbon footprint."

    I just told him I was trying to maximize mine because I didn't want to starve the plants he was eating.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My sister pulled something like this on me a few weeks ago when she said something about "cutting down on plastic use".

      I retorted that I'd gladly double or triple my plastic use to make up for her lack of "usage".

      Delete