Gary sometimes worried that Dean was getting ahead of himself, overpromising what they might not be able to deliver, and he started to resent the amount of attention Dean was hogging. He also wondered when Dean was going to pony up more money—so far he had invested only twenty-eight thousand dollars. Red Birch Energy had borrowed two hundred fifty thousand to buy the piece of property from Dean where the refinery was built, and it bothered Gary that Dean, though he poured in plenty of sweat equity and never saved his receipts for reimbursement, didn’t invest a penny of his profit in their new company. But Dean was under pressure from his truck stop next door, which was financially hurting, and he used the money to shore it up. Then came the news that Dean’s map of the property was wrong. He had taken land away to refinance the store without telling his partners, and the refinery had lost half its road frontage, its parking area, and some of the ground where the storage tanks stood. The smaller footprint reduced their collateral.
But Dean put Red Birch Energy on the regional map. He knew how to pitch the idea better than anyone else, and Gary learned to talk like him. In August, they started refining biodiesel out of waste vegetable oil, soybean oil, and animal fats bought on the market, blending it with highway diesel, and selling it at the pumps next door. There were a few sleepless nights as Dean and Gary waited to hear how the truck engines performed on their new fuel. Everything ran smoothly, and they revved up the crushers and began processing the canola seed they’d bought from an experimental farm in North Carolina. The machines squirted a jet of oil into a basin and sheared off flat black pieces of meal that would be sold for livestock feed. It took two days to break down the triglycerides with chemical additives and wash glycerin from the mixture before the oil was converted to biodiesel. The refinery began selling two thousand gallons of fuel a day at Dean’s truck stop next door. The plan was to ramp up to ten thousand a day, or two and a half million a year.
That summer, Red Birch Energy began to make money. They were able to sell a gallon of biodiesel blended at 20 percent for four dollars at Dean’s pumps, which gave them the dime’s edge they needed over other truck stops. Dean thought they had the whole thing licked. It would be a Pandora’s box for big oil—and once it was open, Katie, bar the door! People in the area would see the need, they’d see how the oil companies and foreign countries had them hog-tied. The next step would be to license the model all over rural Virginia and North Carolina.
But simultaneous with the materialization of Dean’s dream—for that’s what all this was, he knew, it was the fulfillment of that dream about the old wagon road—his other business, the one he had turned against, the fast-food-and-convenience-store chain, headed in the other direction. For during the same months of 2008 when Red Birch Energy was starting up, housing prices were dropping all over the country, and in the Piedmont, where the economy had been depressed for a decade, the crisis was forcing people to choose between paying their mortgages and putting gas in the car—at a moment when gas prices were at an all-time high—to drive to work. Foreclosure signs started appearing on properties that had never been worth very much. Dean saw the crisis as a ripple effect of the rising cost of fuel—a consequence of peak oil. But what was good for the new economy was bad for the old. And like a line of dominoes, his overleveraged businesses began to fail, one after another.
The first to go was the Back Yard Burgers in Danville. Almost immediately, weekly sales dropped 30 percent, from $17,000 to $12,000. In fast food, the break-even was around $12,500. As his customers’ disposable income dried up, they decided that they couldn’t afford $5.50 for a cheeseburger and fries and went across the mall to pay $4.50 at McDonald’s. That dollar difference was all it took, and the collapse happened in less than sixty days. The next year, Dean lost $150,000 on the restaurant and had to get rid of it.
But Dean had made a big mistake, which was to put all his stores and restaurants under one corporate entity—Red Birch of Martinsville, Inc.—on one banknote. So when a crack appeared in one wall, the whole edifice started to fall down, and because he was in trouble with one restaurant, he couldn’t get a loan to keep the others going. The next one to go was the truck stop near the Martinsville Speedway: Bojangles’ exercised its option to pull the franchise in late 2009, and he had to close the truck stop in early 2010. After that, he closed the stand-alone Bojangles’ restaurant in Martinsville. He made enough on the sale of both to pay off the bank, but some of his vendors became his creditors. Whatever money had been left from the sale of the Stokesdale store to the Indians went up in smoke. “I made a million dollars,” Dean said, “and I lost a million dollars.”
The economic crisis wasn’t the only culprit. Dean had lost all interest in the stores and delegated the management to an accountant in Martinsville, and his employees were ripping him off. Dean’s friend Howard said, “Dean wouldn’t check on those people—they was stealing him blind. He was bringing it in the front door with a damn teaspoon, they was taking it out the back door with a shovel. They just robbed him blind. The one in Bassett was one of the main culprits. He just didn’t have sense enough.”
“I was concentrating on biodiesel,” Dean said. But it turned out that his dream of the future depended on his past. When his businesses started to fail, the domino standing at the end of the line was America’s 1st BioDiesel Truck Stop.
RADISH QUEEN: ALICE WATERS
Alice was passionate about beauty—she wanted it around her all the time. She lived intensely through her senses and arranged fresh flowers everywhere and knew to leave the western windows uncurtained to flood the restaurant with golden afternoon light. Her palate was infallible, her food memory indelible. If she said, “This needs a little more lemon,” it did. And the dishes were pure simplicity and delight: winter root-vegetable soup, mesclun salad with goat cheese, roast pork, asparagus vinaigrette, tarte tatin.
Her favorite word was delicious, and her favorite poem, which once hung above her kitchen table in Berkeley in the sixties, was by Wallace Stevens: while Huns are slaughtering eleven thousand virgins and her own martyrdom is imminent, Saint Ursula makes an offering of radishes and flowers to the Lord, who
felt a subtle quiver,
that was not heavenly love,
or pity.
Instead of the slaughter, Alice, too, saw radishes and flowers, and in them she saw her heart’s desire. She was always falling in love—with a dish, a coat, a man, an idea—and she seldom failed to get what she wanted, sparing no expense (she was forever careless about money), because the tiny frame and rushed-off-her-feet manner and nervous girlish voice and hands on your arm concealed an iron will.
There were two major epiphanies in Alice’s life. The first was about beauty, and it came to her in France, the country that represented everything that was pleasing to the senses. In 1965, she took a semester off from Berkeley just after the heady rush of the Free Speech Movement and went with a friend to study in Paris, where they soon drifted away from their coursework and lost themselves in onion soup, Gauloises cigarettes, outdoor markets, and Frenchmen. On a trip to Brittany, Alice and her friend dined in a little stone house with a dozen tables upstairs under pink tablecloths. The windows gave out onto a stream and a garden that had just yielded their trout and raspberries. At the end of the meal, everyone in the restaurant burst into applause and cried out to the chef, “C’est fantastique!”
That was how Alice wanted to live—like a Frenchwoman, in a tightly wound cloche from the 1920s, baguettes with apricot jam and café au lait in the mornings, long afternoons in a café, spectacularly fresh dinners like the one in Brittany. In fact, she wanted to run the restaurant herself, feeding her friends while they sat for hours and talked about film, flirted, laughed, danced. But she would bring her Francophilic dreams back to puritanical, mass-produced America.
Alice loved the revolutionary atmosphere of Berkeley in the late 1960s, but hers was going to be a revolution of the senses, a communal experience of pleasure. Around 1970 eating in Americ
a was a mix of fussy French restaurant cuisine and Swanson’s frozen dinners. McDonald’s served its five billionth burger in 1969, its ten billionth in 1972. And between those landmarks, in the summer of 1971, Chez Panisse, named for a character in an old Marcel Pagnol film, opened its doors on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley.
The menu offered only one choice of meal, written on a blackboard:
Pâté en croûte
Canard aux olives
Plum tart
Café
$3.95
The line stretched out the door. Some people had to wait two hours for their entrée. Others were never seated that night. Inside the kitchen all was chaos, but the dining room was gastronomic heaven. All the ingredients came from local sources—the ducks from Chinatown in San Francisco, the produce from a Japanese concession—and the plums, from local trees, were at their ripest. Alice, at age twenty-seven, had started something.
Chez Panisse was an ongoing celebration of food of a particular kind—grown locally and seasonally. Alice and her staff foraged around the Bay Area for ingredients, sometimes literally in streams and along railroad tracks for the greens and berries they wanted. She was appalled by the thought of serving food that had been frozen or trucked in from out of state. Once, the frozen food industry held a contest to see if expert panelists could tell fresh from frozen—twenty versions of the same ingredient, fresh or frozen, cooked in various dishes. Alice got every single one right.
The restaurant celebrated something else: bohemia. The atmosphere was open and informal, within the extreme snobbery of fresh ingredients and simple cooking. The staff had affairs with one another (none more than Alice—she liked her attachments without obligations), the restaurant was financed with hippie drug money, chefs did coke to keep themselves going, waiters took a toke on their way into the dining room, busboys stuffed opium up the ass before their shift (to avoid nausea), and at the end of the night there was dancing in the dining room. Alice was an inspiring, critical, and chaotic leader, and years went by in the red, and several times the whole thing nearly came crashing down, but always the little delicate-featured woman with the hair cut short would say, “It can be done, it will be done, it’s going to happen, you’ll see.”
And Chez Panisse celebrated one other thing: itself, endlessly.
It took years for Chez Panisse to become the best-known restaurant in America. In the 1980s, the food scene took off around the country, and young people with new money wanted to eat only the best things, or at least be told they were doing so. Alice’s restaurant became a place where wealth and celebrity went to be seen. By the 1990s she was a national figure. She embraced the gospel of virtuous food, insisting that her produce be strictly organic and that her meat come from animals that had been reasonably happy before their slaughter. She spread the good news of sustainability everywhere she went, telling anyone who would listen, “Good food is a right, not a privilege,” and “How we eat can change the world,” and “Beauty is not a luxury.” Alice became a moralist of pleasure, a bohemian scold, holding delicious fundraising dinners for Bill Clinton, then following up with hectoring letters to the young president and First Lady urging them to plant a vegetable garden on the White House lawn as a model for America. To her dismay, they never did, but the country seemed to be catching up with her message as couples in big cities frequented farmers’ markets on Saturdays to buy their heirloom tomatoes and porcini mushrooms. Among people who could afford to care, no word was held in higher esteem than organic. It carried a sanctifying power.
In the midnineties, Alice had her second epiphany. This one began with ugliness. One day, a local reporter interviewed her at Chez Panisse, and as they discussed agriculture in empty urban lots, she suddenly said, “You want to see a great example of how not to use land? You should come look at this enormous school in my neighborhood that looks like nobody cares about it. Everything wrong with our world is bound up in that place.” It was the Martin Luther King Middle School, whose concrete buildings and blacktop playground she drove past every day, thinking they might be abandoned. The quote made it into the paper, the principal saw it, and before long Alice was invited to see the school, and maybe do something about it.
What Alice did was to ask if she could plant a vegetable garden on a neglected acre of land at the edge of the school grounds. She had seen the food sold to the kids—something called a “walking taco,” a plastic bag full of corn chips drowned in a beef-and-tomato mess spooned from a can—and to her it symbolized a completely broken culture. Fast food wasn’t just unhealthful, it spread bad values. She had a grand idea: the students would grow kale and bok choy and dozens of other things in the garden; prepare a nutritious, delicious meal in a school kitchen (currently closed for lack of repair money); and sit down together to eat it in the communal way that had disappeared from their hectic, dysfunctional homes, learning basic table etiquette as they ate and awakening their senses to a new relationship with food.
Alice believed nothing could improve what was wrong with California’s miserable public schools so radically as a vegetable garden, and if there was something of the temperance crusader in her, walking through the slums asking why the men drank so much, Alice didn’t let the thought trouble her for a moment. If a question about priorities was raised—should schools that didn’t have funds for substitute teachers and classroom supplies spend money on “sustainability education”?—Alice got a steely look in her eye. “It can be done, it will be done, it’s going to happen, you’ll see.”
This was the start of her transformation from restaurateur to evangelist. It took a couple of years to raise the money privately and get the official approval, the personnel, and—hardest of all—the participation of the students. But once the Edible Schoolyard got going, it was such a success that other cities around the country adopted the idea. In 2001, Alice brought it to Yale, where her daughter was an entering freshman. Four years later, Alice’s idea took root on the National Mall.
And when Barack Obama arrived at the White House, Alice immediately wrote to him: “At this moment in time, you have a unique opportunity to set the tone for how our nation should feed itself. The purity and wholesomeness of the Obama movement must be accompanied by a parallel effort in food at the most visible and symbolic place in America—the White House.” When Michelle Obama announced in May 2009 that there would be a vegetable garden on the White House grounds, everyone regarded Alice as its godmother.
In the sixties, most Americans ate more or less the same, bad things. Chicken à la king with a wedge of iceberg lettuce was a popular dish, while fondue made its way among the more daring. But in the new millennium, food divided Americans as rigidly as just about everything else. Some people ate better, more carefully than ever, while others got grossly overweight on processed foods. Some families, usually intact, educated, prosperous ones, made a point of sitting down together to a locally sourced, mindfully prepared dinner at home several nights a week. Others ate fast-food takeout together in the car, if at all. Alice helped make food into a political cause, a matter of social change and virtuous lifestyles, but in the age of Chez Panisse, food could not help being about class. Her refusal to compromise her own standards led others to turn her revolutionary spirit on its head.
For some Americans, the local, organic movement became a righteous retreat into an ethic defined by consumer choices. The movement, and the moral pressure it brought to bear in parts of society, declared: Whatever else we can’t achieve, we can always purify our bodies. The evidence lay in the fanaticism of the choices. A mother wondered aloud on a neighborhood Listserv whether it was right to let her little girl go on being friends with another girl whose mother fed them hot dogs. This woman was sanitizing herself and her daughter against contamination from a disorderly and dangerous society in which the lives and bodies of the poor presented a harsh example. Alice hated the word elitist, but these were elite choices, because a single mother working three jobs could never have the time, money, and
energy to bring home kale with the right pedigree, or share Alice’s sublime faith in its beneficence.
Alice wanted to bring people to a better life, but she had trouble imagining that the immediate comfort of a walking taco might be exactly what a twelve-year-old wanted. When she heard the criticisms, she turned away, to the radishes and flowers. Anyone who was passionate enough about organic strawberries, she believed, could afford to buy them. “We make decisions every day about what we’re going to eat. And some people want to buy Nike shoes—two pairs!—and other people want to eat Bronx grapes, and nourish themselves. I pay a little extra, but this is what I want to do.”
TAMPA
Tampa was going to be America’s Next Great City. That was what the 1982 book Megatrends said—Tampa would be one of ten “new cities of great opportunity,” all of them in the Sunbelt—and in 1985 the Chamber of Commerce decided to aim higher than the city’s hedonistic motto from the seventies, which had been “Tampa: Where the good life gets better every day,” and replaced it with “America’s Next Great City.” The words appeared on billboards, bumper stickers, and T-shirts, and who could doubt that they would prove true when Tampa had a new international airport, it had the 1984 Super Bowl, it had the NFL Buccaneers, it had the eleven million square feet of the Westshore business and shopping district, it had sunshine and beaches, and it was growing as fast as anywhere in the country? Fifty million new people came to Florida every year, and since the sunshine and beaches weren’t going anywhere, Tampa would continue to grow, and by growing, become great.
It grew and grew. It grew in order to grow. It grew throughout the eighties, in good economic times and bad, when pro-growth conservatives ran the Hillsborough County Commission and when pro-planning progressives ran the county commission. It grew throughout the nineties, when Tampa Bay got the NHL Lightning and the major league Devil Rays, plus another Super Bowl. After the millennium it grew like gangbusters. Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush, was a developer, so he understood all about growth, and the county commission became majority Republican, with one or two votes safely in the pocket, and maybe the pay, of the developers, the land use attorneys, the builders, and Ralph Hughes. Hughes was a former boxer with a conviction for felony assault who, until he died owing more than three hundred million dollars in taxes, owned a company, Cast-Crete, that made all the precast concrete beams for all the doorways in all the subdivisions that were going up all over Hillsborough County.
The Unwinding Page 21
