What’s BEST about the Ladybug?
Posted by angel on Apr 18, 2009 in words for the wise | 113 views
We applied for the BEST award, given out to some of the city’s most sustainable businesses. Here is some of what I wrote for that, I thought I would share that here. It’s a lot of the things that people ask about at the cafe, sometimes I have more time to talk about it than others, so for those times when I can’t talk, here’s what I would probably say.
Society is an eco-system of its own, one that needs to be nurtured, maintained and cared for in order to thrive and sustain itself. In order for our neighborhood and our city to be successful and in turn, for our café to be successful we must take care of ourselves and those around us. We purchase ingredients as locally as possible, we buy flour from Bob’s Red Mill in Milwaukie, we use milk, eggs, butter, etc. that are from a family farm in Washington, we use local honey from Glory Bee Foods in Eugene. We put an emphasis on using seasonal produce that we get from Sauvie Island Organics, Organically Grown Company and from the farmers market. We are all organic, everything from the coffee, tea, milk and sugar to the pastries, bagels and the eggs Benedict. It’s best for the farmers, the farms, the water system, the air, and for the people who eat the foods that we make here at the Ladybug.
When someone stops at 7-Eleven for a drink, they go in and are given many choices; the variety and quality of these choices are made by someone else. It is the person making those kinds of decisions that ultimately dictate a lot about what consumers can consume. The options that the average consumer had 100 years ago were very different than what it is now. As a business, we have the added responsibility of being a large consumer of many products. It is through our choices and decisions of what we offer and do not offer to our customer base that we make a statement to all of the people and companies that come before us in the production cycle. The statement which we choose to make is that we believe in local, we believe in organics, we believe in sustainability, we believe in community. We believe that the only way that we as a society and as a species will be able to continue to function and improve is by treating the earth in the same respectful manner in which we would like to be treated. All of our purchasing decisions at the Ladybug are guided by this ethic, whether it is what kind of milk we use or what kind of toilet paper we stock in our bathrooms or the fact that when you come in for brunch you are given a cloth napkin that is laundered in house with locally made, eco-friendly soap.
We make everything from scratch at the Ladybug using all organic ingredients and lots of love. We purchase our ingredients from companies that have the same ethics that we have. At the Ladybug we have used 100% wind power since we first moved into our location. We recycle, compost or give away just about everything that isn’t consumed. We don’t have garbage service here, we average about 5-8 lbs of garbage a week; the average restaurant in the US puts about 50,000 lbs of garbage in the landfill every year, we’re probably at about 100-150 lbs since we opened in May of 2007. We sort all of our recyclables and then we take them to the recycling center. We collect boxes and bubble wrap and other types of packaging and give it to Blue Moon, the camera store across the street, for them to use to ship out typewriters and cameras. Our bathrooms have electric hand dryers in them to avoid the use of paper towels when not necessary: in essence you are drying your hands with the wind. We save up the egg cartons and give them to local chicken farms who use them for their eggs. Lately we’ve been giving the egg cartons away to customers for them to use for plant starts. We don’t sell bottled water, first of all because it’s water, everyone should be able to have water and second because it’s just as easy to drink water out of a real glass than it is to drink it out of a bottle that gets used one time and only maybe gets recycled. When people come into the Ladybug they are served with real silverware(that was all purchased secondhand), real ceramic cups and real china plates. While we prefer that everyone sit in and use the real stuff, we do also have to-go containers, all of which are made out of compostable materials, with the exception of the hot drink lids, which still need a lot of help in the compostable variety. Every aspect of making and selling food and drink at the Ladybug has been planned with the desire to be as low impact on our environment as possible. At the end of the night we even dump out the ice water, from chilling foods down, under the trees outside instead of pouring perfectly clean water down the drain, just to be sent to the water treatment facility and contributing to the overloaded system.
Several of our customers collect our produce scraps and egg shells and use them in their gardens or as chicken food here in our neighborhood. We compost all the plate scrapings and other food wastes that don’t work as chicken food and take that over to Metro to be sent to the composting facility. All of the coffee grounds that we have from making coffee, we bag up and put out for our customers to use in their compost at home, I’m always surprised at how quickly the coffee grounds fly out the door. Nothing that’s edible ever gets wasted, whether we snack on it ourselves, give it to the other business in the area, donate it to a shelter or charity or even sometimes I bring leftovers to the homeless people I pass on my way home.
All of our food is nutritious, we don’t use anything artificial, we never use any of the corn syrup, we don’t use canola oil, we believe in whole foods for whole people, made with good intentions.
I was responsible for setting up the basic framework for just about everything here at the Ladybug. I’m a Master Recycler and just generally believe in being a good person. When I started Ladybug, I wanted to run my business the same way I run my personal life, this has translated into a company in which I have been fortunate enough to surround myself with like-minded people that want to contribute to making the world a better place. We are able to collectively work on improving the things that we do and maintaining those that are working well.
We’re a bunch of good people, doing something that we love in a way that we know makes our community a better place. At the end of the day we’re all in this together and we’re proud to act on that belief.
