Sunset Magazine hosts a Celebration Weekend each year at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. We attended today for the second time. As usual, there were tours of the test kitchen, access to the beautifully landscaped grounds, tented stages with seating for lectures and demonstrations, dozens of vendor booths, and more than enough sunshine.
This year, a discernibly deeper green tinge permeated the event, both driving and responding to consumer demand for more environmentally friendly products and services. In addition to Sunset's standard practices such as discounts for transit riders, bicyclists, and shuttle users, notable new green elements included:
Healthier food samples. No instant pudding this year - Kraft's high fiber snack bars, cereals, crackers and even cheeses (an 'active' line, with probiotic fiber added); Safeway's salads, carrots with cucumber feta dip, and a light dessert of chocolate bits with fresh fruit made return visitors of many happy grazers.
On-site food waste collection. Most samples were served on paper (napkins, cups, trays) or with compostable plastic (the corn starch forks). Well-distributed throughout the grounds were clusters of clearly marked receptacles, one for recyclable bottles and cans, one for trash, and one for compost. Eyeballing the contents, it appeared that visitors got it.
A stronger emphasis on succulents, drought tolerant species, and native plants, both at the lecture stages and the demonstration gardens.
An "eco-lounge" stage, with speakers on topics such as What is a Carbon Footprint?, Compost, Solar 101, and Eating Locally.
More vendors of specifically green products and services, such as Ecofabulous, Terrapass, Solar City, and Branch (sustainable design). Most of them had booths in the far corner by the eco-lounge; but a few were sprinkled throughout the more traditional vendor areas(eg, Numi Tea and Akeena Solar).
Sponsor Chrysler worked hard at marketing its vehicles as green, exhibiting a new hybrid, a flex-fuel vehicle, and a concept car (electric with a fuel cell backup) in addition to its regular minivan and sedans.
Sunset offered an organic cotton T-shirt and a bamboo fiber cap, both as contest prizes and as event merchandise (at a large discount, comparing the event price to comparable retailers).
City chickens in the demonstration garden pecked happily in the dirt, with a sign previewing their appearance in the August magazine article, "The One-Block Feast."
My favorite green feature, however, was not new or newly packaged as eco-friendly. The California Artisan Cheese Guild provides a free tasting gallery each year with samples from some of the finest small cheesemakers of the region. Today's selection included Three Sisters Farmstead Cheese's Serena (as nutty and intense as a Dutch beemster); Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company's Original Blue; Cypress Grove Chevre; and Harley Farms goat cheeses. Nothing says sustainability to me like the best of the Slow Food movement.
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