It's Getting Easier Being Green

I tasted a yogurt in Vermont last week that was so good I’m pretty sure my eyes snapped shut while eating it. It was Organic Maple Yogurt (made with Jersey cow whole milk and maple syrup) from Butterworks Farm, a 25 year-old Vermont dairy up near the Canadian border. I’ve never cared much for yogurt, but I got back to New York and couldn’t stop thinking about it, or stop my mouth from watering every time I did. I still have to struggle to eat better so that my daughters will one day do it reflexively, but yogurt's always been an off-putting food to me, I think partly because of it's virtuous reputation. I'm always thrilled when I come across a food where the organic version crushes the conventional version I grew up eating, so I started hunting around for it. I've been feeding my daughters yogurt since they were born, but I was looking forward to feed something I actually like.

Whole Foods and Fairway only had the plain yogurt from Butterworks, and Back to the Land near me in Brooklyn had never heard of it. One of the other nice things about people who care about the food they make is that they want to talk to you about it. I doubt the president of Danon's taking my call, but I found the Butterworks farm online and left Jack Lazor a slightly desperate message about my search for the yogurt. He called me back and couldn't have been nicer because he obviously really loves what he does -- for starters, I was in a cloud of exhaust on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and he was standing in the middle of a field. Inching along in traffic I wrote down the number Jack gave me for United Natural Foods, a big organic food distributor in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, and gave them a call. They were very nice, and their advice was to just ask stores to stock it. I tried a few more healthy stores near me, and finally hit pay dirt with Adam at the organic superstore Perelandra in Brooklyn Heights. I was told I could make a special order, but was able to convince Adam to order for the store and see how it sells instead. “What the hell, I have the shelf space,” he said. “It’ll be here Friday.” This was pretty exciting news to me and made me feel about as in touch with my food chain as possible. It made me realize I have choices and control and don't have to settle for what's in front of me in the supermarket.

I’m not sure what it is about yogurt lately, maybe that America has at last embraced the sour over the sweet, but I heard a lot of people getting animated on the subject this summer. Brown Cow, Liberte, Erivan, Oikos, Fage, The Greek Gods – we’ve finally moved past the super sweet, weirdly textured stuff into the territory of those sophisticated Europeans. Another thing New Yorkers have been talking about lately, and I realize I’m coming a little late to it, is Kombucha, a fermented tea made with a colony of yeast cultures (called a “kombucha” colony). It’s been around forever, but is now officially riding the celebrity wave –- Lindsay Lohan drinks it; Tina Fey talked about it on Letterman; the cast of Grey’s Anatomy has cases of G.T. Dave’s Organic Raw Kombucha shipped to the set.

It’s said to boost the immune system and G.T. Dave started bottling his home brew when his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1994 (she made a complete recovery). His label claims that during the process of delicately culturing the tea essential nutrients like enzymes, probiotics, amino acids, antioxidants and polyphenols are formed. It comes in many flavors but the Raspberry Rush is my favorite. At $2.50-$5.00 it’s a once in a while kind of thing, but it's another example of the organic version being so much better than the conventional.