Now You Can Have Your Green Cake and Eat It, Too

By Rebecca Pattiz

If you are starting to feel guilty about your failure to recycle or your occasional failure to turn off the lights, there is an easy and surprising way to appease your conscience—pastries.

With the whole world going green, it is no surprise that we are changing our level of environmental consciousness in everyday activities, including the satisfaction of our sweet tooth. Bakeries with greener outlooks are popping up everywhere, allowing you to decrease your carbon footprint while getting your sugar fix.

Perhaps the trendiest of this new breed of bakery is Babycakes NYC, a vegan and gluten-free bakeshop on the Lower East Side. The tiny space is cute and cozy, giving the impression that your grandma very well might be cooking in the back. If you have a very chic and health-conscious grandma, that is. Owner and operator Erin McKenna, a former stylist, left the fashion world for baking and never looked back. McKenna, who has sensitivities to sugar, dairy, and wheat cites her own food restrictions as the impetus for Babycakes.

“The life of a baker never appealed to me until I realized that there were no delicious, healthy, safe alternatives on the baked-good market,” said McKenna. Thankfully, she was not alone in this realization. Her shop has become a celebrity mecca, drawing stars such as Hilary Swank and Halle Berry to sample the sweets.

Though there are many items on the menu, from brownies to cinnamon buns, the cupcakes are the real star here. The cake is moist and the frosting is creamy, giving absolutely no hint that these cupcakes do not contain many of the not-so-healthy things—butter, refined sugar, eggs—that we associate with cupcakes’ deliciousness. “We have a lot of customers come in who have no idea that we are a gluten-free and vegan bakery and thoroughly enjoy what we have to offer. Sometimes, they even leave without figuring it out,” said McKenna.

If you are concerned about the environment, but have no qualms about a liberal use of butter and sugar, Birdbath perfectly balances environmental consciousness with taste. Created by Maury Rubin, Birdbath is a tiny space created entirely from sustainable materials. Rubin can often be found giving tours of the bakery to intrigued customers, showing off the walls made of wheat and the floors of reclaimed wood from Pennsylvania. Items like the “save the polar bears pastry claw” exemplify the special personality that has made Birdbath a success.

Needless to say, this place is hardcore. This is very much due to Rubin’s own passion for the environment. To build a space made solely of eco-friendly materials is no small feat. Nonetheless, Rubin insists that it was not all that difficult to create Birdbath. “I do not think that it actually takes harder construction, it just takes more ingenuity,” he said.

Rubin applies the same sentiment to finding ingredients, almost all of which are local and organic. The wheat, for example, is all grown east of the Mississippi and milled in Pennsylvania—unusual, as most flour is produced in the Midwest. Birdbath takes the eco-theme as far as it will stretch, giving a discount to customers who arrive on wheels, either by bike, skateboard, or even with a stroller.

With plans of expansion to include another dozen locations, Birdbath is a bakery on a mission. “If people don’t start to do things differently we’ll have problems, we’ll really have problems. So it’s about watching the world go by, watching the physical world fall apart, thinking that it is falling apart, and deciding that a small food business is perfect as a mechanism for trying to help,” said Rubin.

If Babycakes and Birdbath are the young trendsetters in the eco-baking world, Whole Earth Bakery is their wise and traditional grandfather. A crowd of regulars can be found sitting at the bakery’s countertop, reminiscing about the old days on the Lower East Side and praising the talents of the owner, Peter Silvestri. Whole Earth was founded by Silvestri and his mother after the pair sold their homemade cookies at a local flea market to rave reviews. Silvestri researched bakery locations in a newspaper, paid $1,500 for the space, and began business from there. Though Silvestri’s mother recently passed away at age 94, she worked with him at the bakery until that point, making her somewhat of a legend.

Up until about eight years ago, the bakery still made non-vegan products. The change was a gradual one, but now, as Silvestri proudly announces to all customers who peruse his cases, everything is completely vegan. As much a philosopher as he is a baker, Silvestri is happy to share his musings with anyone willing to listen.
“One must be careful of animal product these days, with what they’re doing to animals,” he said. “That’s my take on the amount of diseases that are present in our society. How people treat each other these days… can you imagine how they would treat something that can’t speak back?” Silvestri’s own vegetarianism—he confesses that he is not completely vegan—began first as a “selfish sort of emphasis… First I was macrobiotic, but the idea of it is like for my own body, my own health, my own self,” he said.

Now, Silvestri will often explain the need for society to stop eating meat as a much broader and existentialist idea, linking people to animals and thus to their environment. As much as Silvestri can talk, he has the baking chops to back it up and is constantly inventing new recipes and doling them out the next day to the supportive comments of customers. From vegan pizza to soy cheesecake to various cookies, Whole Earth is entirely committed to providing honest, hearty, and delicious vegan food, without the trendiness that one associates with the newer bakeries.

As the green trend continues and new eco-conscious restaurants and bakeries become more and more hip, we are left wondering if this trend toward environmental conciousness is here to stay. According to the owners of the bakeries, the answer is yes. Birdbath’s Rubin said that although greenness is currently “too trendy,” once the hype dies down, we will be left with “business practices and goods and services that are for real.”

Silvestri, whose own bakery is currently involved in rent issues and is not generating the same publicity as Babycakes and Birdbath are, is surprisingly quick to defend the current green trend as well. He points to McDonald’s and other seemingly anti-vegan institutions. He believes that the fact that even these chains and fast-food joints are offering vegan and vegetarian options is a sign of progress and not something to complain about.

Regardless of the lasting power of the country’s newfound environmental concern, as McKenna points out, more greenness equals more tasty and healthy options when it comes to sweets. So greenhouse gasses and energy crises aside, the increase in green bakeries may not only make for a cleaner planet, but a tastier one as well.

http://www.columbiaspectator.com/?q=node/28328