Celebrate Earth Day!

Among the many things to embrace about Earth Day, here is a good one — it is international. What began in the United States in 1970 as a plea among worried people to treat the world with more care has blossomed into a movement in 192 countries, making it the largest secular holiday in the world. More than a billion people celebrate the planet’s special day.

That includes all of us here at Fresh Thymes Eatery World Headquarters, of course. In fact, we try hard to mark Eath Day every day, through how we run our restaurant.

It is not always simple. From Boulder to Buenos Aires to Bangkok, the restaurant business is notoriously wasteful. At most restaurants, an awful lot of what ends up on a plate is packaged up and shipped from far away. Scraps — so very many scraps — get tossed, destined for landfills. Recycling does not happen. The celery in the soup sprouted from a poison-drenched field, and the bacon in the burger came from a pig pumped with antibiotics and other drugs, and confined in appallingly tight quarters.

None of this is exactly earth-friendly.

How do we run a restaurant while toiling to honor Mother Earth?

There are the scraps — or the lack thereof. We use every part of every vegetable. What doesn’t become part of a salad, or a slaw, or a burger garnish gets used to make vegetable stock. Carrot ends become ingredients in pot pies. Bones? They are treasure! We break-down whole chickens, and reserve the backs for bone broth. You won’t find us tossing bones into trash cans. Anything that just can’t become part of a dish is turned into compost. Scraps at Fresh Thymes? Not so much.

We recycle everything that can be recycled, and only use napkins and take-out containers, among other things, that can be recycled. We even recycle our customer's drinking water, using 5 gallon buckets. When they are full, we water the plants around our Steelyards neighborhood. On average, we are recycling 8 gallons of water a day!

We look beyond our neighborhood, too. We think pesticide-driven agriculture is unfortunate, and in addition to broadcasting far too many poisons into soil and water, contributes to waste. So we strive for organic produce — most of what we sell is organic. And we shrink from the sprawl of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) across America, animal-raising businesses that harm animals by holding them in extremely close, and unsanitary, conditions, as well as using antibiotics and other drugs to sustain them through the inhumane conditions. We are picky about our meat. All of it comes from small farms in Colorado.

In addition, precious little that we cook and serve is shipped from beyond the state borders. Yes, our lemons and our olive oil, our caraway and black pepper and mangoes grow in places far from Colorado. But most of what you eat — the lamb, lettuce, chile pepper, peach and so on — comes from our breathtaking state.

We are always hunting for ways to lighten our footprint upon this glorious, miraculous planet. If you have ideas to help us along, please speak up! Your comments are gifts.

Happy Earth Day!