I'll have the free-range Jello
Nancy Pelosi has turned the House cafeteria into a PC food fest.
Ayear after Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) became speaker of the House, the legislative landscape has not changed all that much because many of her most ambitious goals -- winding down the war in Iraq and rolling back key provisions of President Bush's tax cuts -- have not been met. But there's definitely a new landscape in the only part of the Capitol where Pelosi can exert her will entirely untrammeled: the cafeteria in the basement of the House's Longworth Office Building on the south side of the Hill.
"Greening the Capitol" is one of Pelosi's pet projects, and the Longworth cafeteria is the carbon-neutral jewel in her crown.The cafeteria, which primarily caters to House employees but is also open to the general public, ditched its old food contractor and reopened after the holiday recess with a new menu that punches every available slot on the eco-friendly ticket favored by food trendies: "organic" (as in fertilizers and pesticide-free), "sustainable" (as in farming techniques), "rBGH-free" (as in milk), "cage-free" (as in chickens), "fair-traded" (as in grown by co-ops in the Third World), "local" (as in grown within a 150-mile radius in the First World) and, where possible, combinations of two or more of the above. Oh, and no trans fats -- this cafeteria food is good for you too.
In the old days, the House cafeteria, like its Senate counterpart in the basement of the Dirksen Office Building on the north side of the Hill (also open to the public except during the lunch rush), offered the usual cafeteria fare: meatloaf, burgers, chili, giant slabs of coconut cake with mountains of whipped bad cholesterol on top. You can still get a burger in the Longworth cafeteria -- but it's made from "humanely raised, antibiotic-free beef." You can still get chili too -- if you prefer "roasted corn and poblano chili" to the old-fashioned meat-and-beans variety.
There's more on the new menu. Instead of a classic BLT, you can order a "PLT" -- that's a portabello, lettuce and tomato sandwich. For $6.75, you can get panzanella salad, which, for the uninitiated, is the new Caesar salad -- more or less the same thing but with bigger croutons. The coffee comes from a Costa Rican outfit, called Pura Vida, that embodies a trifecta of environmental and other correctness. It's organic, it's fair-traded and it's "shade-grown," which means grown in jungle-like conditions that harbor migratory birds whose habitats are threatened by deforestation elsewhere.
