The venerable restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley turns 40 years old in August. Their founder, Alice Waters, started the famous Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley which became a nationwide model for educating children the importance of food. According to their site:

This fall, the Chez Panisse Foundation will become
The Edible Schoolyard organization.
Together we will build a national curriculum for
Edible Education in the school system.

Pretty cool! They’ve got a lot of great events: speakers, fairs, and of course, food! The free event on  on 8/27 at the UC Berkeley Art museum looks like fun for all ages. Check out their website for more information.

After living in the East Bay for several months, I started to discover some nice places to shop for organic produce. Here are some spots I visited:

Berkeley Bowl/Berkeley Bowl West

• Pros: This place is like a produce mecca for anyone obsessed with fresh fruits and vegetables. Tons of varieties. Organic produce prices on many core items (e.g. apples, broccoli, onions) are very good. Berkeley Bowl West has its own separate organic section which is nice, but the original Berkeley Bowl seems to have more varieties than the Berkeley Bowl West. Parking is easier in Berkeley Bowl West.
• Cons: Mad shoppers hitting their carts throughout aisles, grabbing the best produce possible. Be prepared to have a heart attack while parking your car or pushing your shopping cart.

Monterey Market

• Pros: This place has really amazing produce. I think the quality is even better than Berkeley Bowl. It doesn’t offer as much variety as Berkeley Bowl does, but it still is pretty amazing given its size. The prices are really good, and produce is SUPER fresh.
• Cons: Again, like Berkeley Bowl, prepare for a mad stampede of food – obsessed shoppers with their carts everywhere. It is not a fancy store; don’t expect it to look like Whole Foods (this is not necessarily a con, but I know people who are turned off by Rainbow Grocery for this reason).

Berkeley Farmer’s Market

• Pros: (I’ve been to both the Thu and Sat markets) This place has superb quality, all organic and lots of turnover. Downtown on Saturdays, there’s some hot food which is convenient for a quick bite or lunch. On Thursdays on Shattuck and Rose, there is less variety of hot food but I love the organic hot food vendor, Today’s Special! It is really an excellent find.
• Cons: It does get a little crowded, and sometimes by the end of the day, the food quality gets low due to heat or just staying out so long. Otherwise it’s a good market.

Temescal Farmer’s Market

• Pros: This is an amazing find in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood which is becoming really up and coming. The quality of these vendors are A+ with people like Cowgirl Creamery and Prather Ranch (which are truly hard to find as market vendors).
• Cons: Wow, this place is expensive. After being used to Monterey Market and Berkeley Bowl prices, it’s hard to recalibrate what I expect to see in food prices. $8 for 3 sausages that aren’t even organic or nitrate free? No thanks. But to be fair, every produce item we bought that day (kale, carrots, broccoli, bell pepper and spinach) was really probably some of the most amazing produce we have tasted in a long time.

There is probably a lot more fabulous organic produce out there – but these are some great places to check out if you are in the area!

What is hexane? It is a neurotoxin,  listed as a “hazardous air pollutant” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This report is full of disturbing information, including the lack of oversight by the FDA and EPA in these foods products.The long term effects of hexane have not yet been documented. According to the Cornucopia report, in conventional food processing, soybeans are immersed in what the industry calls a “hexane bath” before they are further processed into ingredients such as oil, soy protein isolate, or texturized soy protein (TVP). The soy protein ingredients in most nonorganic foods such as vegetarian burgers and nutrition bars are processed with the use of hexane. It is not used in organic food processing.

How do you know which products are hexane free? In general, organic tofu products do not have hexane. However, there are a few exceptions of organic soy products that do have hexane. Here is a comprehensive scorecard, and a short summary of conventional veggie burgers and soy meat like products:

Avoid these hexane-laced veggie burgers and soy products:

• Amy’s Kitchen
• Boca Burger, conventional
• Franklin Farms
• Garden Burger
• It’s All Good Lightlife
• Morningstar Farms
• President’s Choice
• Taste Above
• Trader Joe’s
• Yves Veggie Cuisine

Products that are hexane-free:

• Boca Burgers “Made with organic soy”
• Helen’s Kitchen
• Morningstar “Made with organic”
• Superburgers by Turtle Island
• Tofurky
• Wildwood

In a future blog post, we’ll evaluate energy bars and infant formula (unfortunately, infant food has hexane too). Ironically, the way I found out about this hexane problem was researching the best organic infant formula for my baby. Stay tuned.

 Update: Winner has been announced. Thank you for participating.

A nice and quaint women’s clothing store called Clary Sage Organics has recently popped up in Pacific Heights. I walked in and the clothes actualy looked good being made out of organic clothes. Most clothing I have seen so far in boutique stores haven’t really caught my eye that are made out of organic fabrics, but Clary Sage is an exception. Check them out on Fillmore Street.

This is my favorite salad. Beets with avocado and grapefruit. Recently its recipe was featured in this month’s Sunset Magazine.

Zen like, relaxing atmosphere. Upstairs is a yoga studio.

Above is their signature dish, a rich cauliflower dish in a cast iron pot. Very creative and rich. However it was a little too creamy for my taste.

Although this doesn’t look the prettiest, this fresh farm egg was to die for. Similar to the type of egg yolk described by Michael Pollan’s Omnivore Dilemma, this yolk was a bright orange yellow and very rich.

All in all, this is an excellent find in downtown Napa. Creative vegetarian food, with great service and a relaxing feel. I’m definitely coming again.

Ubuntu is located on 1140 Main Street in downtown Napa.

In the midst of my own wedding planning, I checked out some interesting organic and green wedding ideas in the Bay Area. One place that I really liked was a restaurant called Barndiva in the beautiful town of Healdsburg.

The owner, Lukka Feldman, gave us a nice tour of the city and offered to host an all inclusive wedding with organic, local food and drinks. The restaurant is a beautiful restored barn with an outdoor garden. It is one of the few restaurants featured in Michelin from the Bay Area. Don’t miss this place for drinks at night if you are in Sonoma wine country.

Recently Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed closing 1 out of 5 California state parks due to a looming deficit. Unfortunately, many of these parks are true gems, nine of them in the San Francisco Bay Area including Henry Coe State Park, Tomales Bay State Park and Portola Redwoods. Under his proposal, the cutting of parks would only save 1% of his deficit, but would close 43 state parks.

 Save the California state parks by joining the California State Parks Foundation, the only nonprofit dedicated to protecting California state parks. I decided to sign up today and become part of the the California States Parks Foundation. Please fight the Governor’s proposal to shut down the parks.