You’ve watched “An Inconvenient Truth.” You feel guilty when you carry your groceries home in a plastic bag.
Welcome to the New World Order in the land of the brave and the home of the green. Or would-be green. Or light green.
Dizzying, isn’t it? Where do you start? What’s an ordinary person to do?
Here’s the challenge we posed: Let’s entertain green. Let’s give a party, set a table, decorate the place in a way that’s sustainable, doable and attractive.
There are trade-offs here, no question. Nothing’s 100 percent clean and green. If you use cloth napkins, you have to wash them. (Cost: Energy! Water!) If you use recycled glass plates, you have to ask what kind of carbon footprint was created by the process of recycling. (Cost: Fuel to haul used glass around, high-temperature kilns to melt it down and reprocess it, more fuel to ship the new dishes to retailers.) Organic/green/sustainable food and tableware may cost more, though prices likely will come down as demand and supply increase.
If it were simple and easy, we’d all be doing it already.
We can tell you what green entertaining isn’t. In the words of Danny Seo, an environmental activist turned party planner, TV personality and author of “Simply Green” (Collins, 160 pages, $19.95), it’s “not about running to the store and buying endless amounts of party decorations and knickknacks that just get thrown out when the evening is over.”
Do what comes naturally
The biggest challenge is to set a table that lives up to the mantra of “reduce, reuse, recycle.”
The easiest way to do that is to use what you use every day: your usual china and flatware. You’re not buying anything new, you’re not creating waste with plastic and paper. “The least damaging is your everyday china,” says Robyn Griggs Lawrence, editor of Natural Home magazine.
If you don’t own enough dishes for a big party, rent them. Or borrow from friends. Or shop at a secondhand store for the plates and flatware you need. “They don’t have to match, and they can break” and you won’t be heartbroken, Lawrence said.
Another top choice for Lawrence is recycled glass plates.
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Plastic may pass the test
If you’re nervous about broken china, you have a couple of alternatives.
One — don’t cringe, though Lawrence does — is plastic, such as melamine, the hard plastic dishware. Yes, it’s a petroleum product, but it can go in the dishwasher and be reused dozens of times, not just tossed in the trash.
Another form of plastic is the plates you find at the party store, clear or in colors. A pack of 20 dinner plates, 10 1/4 inches in diameter, costs about $10 and can be washed and dried by hand and reused.
Recycline’s Preserve Plateware is made from plastic recycled from Stoneyfield Farm yogurt containers. These can go in the dishwasher or can be recycled in communities that accept No. 5 plastic. (Find these at Whole Foods markets, www .recycline.com, or www.green feet.com. A 10-pack of 10-inch plates is $7.50 at greenfeet.)
If you don’t like the alternatives you can wash and reuse, you have options in the area of those intended for single use that you can dispose of responsibly. Plates made from organically grown, highly sustainable bamboo will biodegrade in four to six months, the manufacturer says. An eight-pack of 11-inch dinner plates is $10.95, at www.greenfeet.com .
Some paper plates are compostable and biodegradable. Chinet, for example, makes some lines of plates from recycled materials, some of which are biodegradable in home composting systems. Read the label carefully.
And at www.biodegradable store.com you can buy tableware plates, cups, utensils, more made from corn polymer, potato starch or sugar cane.
Choosing your flatware
Recently, Diamond brand introduced Renew dinnerware, flatware made from recycled plastic with cutout handles that uses 10 percent less plastic overall and can be cleaned in the dishwasher. A package of eight each of forks, knives and spoons is $1.59.
A three-piece place setting of hand-washable bamboo flatware is $3.95 at Crate and Barrel ( www.crateandbarrel.com ), which also sells pressed-bamboo dinnerware that can be hand-washed and reused (prices start at $3.95).
At www.greenfeet.com , compostable bamboo sporks are $9.50 for a bag of 24. They’re intended for one-time use. They’ll break down after a few months in the compost pile.
Recycled has its price
You also can find plates made of recycled materials, such as the Seventh Generation brand, made from 83 percent postconsumer materials (about $5 for a pack of 40). They may not also be biodegradable, but consumer demand helps create a market for recycled goods.
Once you’ve made a decision, you and your conscience can live with about plates and cutlery, think about the rest of the table. If you want to go the paper route, you can use napkins made from recycled paper (many manufacturers sell these; read the label at the grocery store). A vinyl tablecloth that you wipe off and reuse, though made of plastic, is another choice.
Seo, the green entertainer, likes to use inexpensive bandannas as napkins. (He buys his at the Army-Navy store.) When dinner’s over, he uses them to tie up flatware and plates for transport home to be washed.
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Guess who’s coming to dinner
We asked some of the participants in this story to tell us how they’d entertain Al Gore, whose film “An Inconvenient Truth” has galvanized public opinion about climate change.
“I’d probably do a small dinner and use local produce. I’m a big believer in eating organically, but if the food is from Chile as opposed to 20 miles away, I’d go with locally grown. I’ve also discovered there’s now a good selection of organic wines and beers. We’d be relaxing and looking at what our carbon footprint was when we were done, and be able to talk about that.”
— Susan Angel, wedding and party planner, Boise, Idaho
“I’d have him come on a Saturday or a Wednesday. Those are the days we have the farmers market out here in Boulder, Colo. I’d make whatever was available from the farmers market. I have a big old antique Eastern Indian table that I set pretty casually. I’d make him lots and lots of food.”
— Robyn Griggs Lawrence, editor, Natural Home magazine
“I worked on the Clinton/Gore campaign and met Al a few times. I’d serve whatever was in season and the freshest there is. You can never go wrong with grilled fruit with a big scoop of the best vanilla ice cream. Who wouldn’t love that? And exquisite wines are always an A+.”
— Danny Seo, TV personality and author who specializes in green entertaining
“I’d definitely do an all-organic menu, seasonal, and from within Florida. For the starter, fresh morel mushrooms and asparagus over a creamy risotto. Then a nice salad of roasted candy-striped and yellow beets. The main course would be a mushroom dinner, king oyster mushrooms and portobellos, something steaklike and meatish. Maybe have some Florida corn. And for dessert, a ginger lemon-grass tapioca with passion-fruit sorbet. For the wines, a chardonnay to start, a pinot noir with the main course, a late-harvest Gewurztraminer with the dessert.”
— Chris Ponte, chef, Cafe Ponte, Largo, Fla.
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Eco-friendly entertaining
Here are more suggestions for entertaining greenly from Susan Angel, a wedding and party planner in Boise, Idaho:
* Think of new uses for common things. For a charity event for Ballet Idaho, Angel bought used 12-inch ceramic floor tiles from a building salvage center ($1 each) and used them as chargers under her dinner plates. She made place cards out of handmade paper impregnated with flower seeds that guests could take home and plant.
* With a bottle cutter, make glass votives out of empty wine bottles.
* Reuse what you have: Paint or decorate terra-cotta pots and plant succulents. Use fabric you have already for table runners.
* If you have to buy, shop at secondhand and thrift shops for flower containers, dishes, flatware, decorative items.
* Choose local flowers. Seventy-seven percent of the cut-flower market in the United States comes from Colombia. Flying those flowers in thousands of miles has a big fuel cost. (The other side: 65 percent of the Colombian flower work force is women, who may be the economic mainstays of their families.)