Organic alternative

Last summer, Christine Keff had an epiphany about how her food was grown. From almonds to zucchini, she dumped conventional ingredients and replaced them with environmentally sensitive organic alternatives.

“It was a personal choice, an awareness of what fertilizers and pesticides were doing to other life forms,” says Miss Keff, chef and owner of Flying Fish restaurant in Seattle. “I could not stomach the arrogance of that anymore. Oddly, it was almost a religious conversion.”

From the temple of all things eco-green, Americans increasingly are hearing a food calling, making choices based not just on how foods will taste for dinner, but on how they are raised and their consequent impacts on the environment. The trend has been there and it is getting stronger all the time.

Consider it a culinary wake-up to reports of global warming, fossil fuel diminishment and fish contamination.

“We are beginning to see the limits of our natural resources, energy and water,” says Arlin Wasserman of Changing Tastes, a food-industry consulting firm that specializes in sustainability issues. “We need better practices on Earth to feed a growing population.”

The Organic Trade Association reports that consumers spent $14 billion on organic foods last year, up $1.8 billion over 2004 from $1 billion in 1990. Meat (55.4 percent), condiments (24.2 percent) and dairy products (23.5 percent) grew the fastest.

Wal-Mart has announced its intention to boost organic offerings. Safeway stores recently launched a line of private-label organic foods, and Hunt’s has introduced canned organic tomatoes and sauces.

The nation’s greening isn’t limited to grocery aisles. Xanterra Parks and Resorts, which operates concessions in national parks such as Yellowstone, touts its use of local and sustainable ingredients in dishes such as organic red lentil ragout and wild Alaskan salmon pinwheels.

The Boulders resort near Scottsdale, Ariz., recently announced it would be the first all-organic resort in the country, harvesting its own produce on property, pouring organic wine and stocking minibars with organic drinks and snacks. Celebrity-obsessed Vanity Fair magazine produced a “green issue” in May, proving environmentalism’s emergence from hippie fringe to popular concern.

“The food tastes better and it’s fresher and people believe it’s better for them,” says chef Michel Nischan, whose new health- food show, “Pure and Simple,” launched on cable’s LIME TV in the same month he opened the organic and sustainable-focused restaurant the Dressing Room with partner Paul Newman in Westport, Conn.

Mr. Nischan cites the rise in obesity and diabetes rates as fueling the interest in better ingredients. “It has been a slow reawakening, driven by flavor,” he says.

Those motivated by flavor and health are at entry levels of ecology, says Samuel Fromartz, author of “Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew” (Harcourt). “Among green consumers, there are all gradations of green from light to dark,” beginning with the supermarket shopper who buys bagged organic lettuce because it’s already cleaned and appealing, he says.

“As green gets darker, then you get concerns about who produced it and how many food miles it traveled. The dark green end asks, ‘Is it coming from a small farmer I know and have a relationship with?’ Darkest is, ‘I want to grow my own food and reduce my ecological footprint.’”

As Kermit the Frog once lamented, it’s not easy being green. The choice between an organic tomato trucked from California to Minnesota and a local, conventionally grown one, when available, is a green-conscious shopper’s dilemma: Go with the chemical-free option or one that doesn’t consume massive amounts of fuel to ship?

“Something organic could come from New Zealand or Australia,” says chef Bruce Sherman of North Pond Restaurant in Chicago. “But by the time it’s flown to me and reaches my restaurant, it’s still organic but not sustainable because it comes from halfway around the globe, which requires fossil fuel that we can’t replace.”

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