The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (28 page)

One thing Dean never mentioned was global warming. There were too many doubters in
his part of the country—as soon as they heard the words, they’d stop listening and
start arguing. Dean himself wasn’t at all sure it was true. He was much more convinced
about peak oil, since there was an example right here in America. He didn’t need global
warming to make the sale.

Gary sometimes worried that Dean was getting ahead of himself, overpromising what
they might not be able to deliver, and he started to resent the amount of attention
Dean was hogging. He also wondered when Dean was going to pony up more money—so far
he had invested only twenty-eight thousand dollars. Red Birch Energy had borrowed
two hundred fifty thousand to buy the piece of property from Dean where the refinery
was built, and it bothered Gary that Dean, though he poured in plenty of sweat equity
and never saved his receipts for reimbursement, didn’t invest a penny of his profit
in their new company. But Dean was under pressure from his truck stop next door, which
was financially hurting, and he used the money to shore it up. Then came the news
that Dean’s map of the property was wrong. He had taken land away to refinance the
store without telling his partners, and the refinery had lost half its road frontage,
its parking area, and some of the ground where the storage tanks stood. The smaller
footprint reduced their collateral.

But Dean put Red Birch Energy on the regional map. He knew how to pitch the idea better
than anyone else, and Gary learned to talk like him. In August, they started refining
biodiesel out of waste vegetable oil, soybean oil, and animal fats bought on the market,
blending it with highway diesel, and selling it at the pumps next door. There were
a few sleepless nights as Dean and Gary waited to hear how the truck engines performed
on their new fuel. Everything ran smoothly, and they revved up the crushers and began
processing the canola seed they’d bought from an experimental farm in North Carolina.
The machines squirted a jet of oil into a basin and sheared off flat black pieces
of meal that would be sold for livestock feed. It took two days to break down the
triglycerides with chemical additives and wash glycerin from the mixture before the
oil was converted to biodiesel. The refinery began selling two thousand gallons of
fuel a day at Dean’s truck stop next door. The plan was to ramp up to ten thousand
a day, or two and a half million a year.

That summer, Red Birch Energy began to make money. They were able to sell a gallon
of biodiesel blended at 20 percent for four dollars at Dean’s pumps, which gave them
the dime’s edge they needed over other truck stops. Dean thought they had the whole
thing licked. It would be a Pandora’s box for big oil—and once it was open, Katie,
bar the door! People in the area would see the need, they’d see how the oil companies
and foreign countries had them hog-tied. The next step would be to license the model
all over rural Virginia and North Carolina.

But simultaneous with the materialization of Dean’s dream—for that’s what all this
was, he knew, it was the fulfillment of that dream about the old wagon road—his other
business, the one he had turned against, the fast-food-and-convenience-store chain,
headed in the other direction. For during the same months of 2008 when Red Birch Energy
was starting up, housing prices were dropping all over the country, and in the Piedmont,
where the economy had been depressed for a decade, the crisis was forcing people to
choose between paying their mortgages and putting gas in the car—at a moment when
gas prices were at an all-time high—to drive to work. Foreclosure signs started appearing
on properties that had never been worth very much. Dean saw the crisis as a ripple
effect of the rising cost of fuel—a consequence of peak oil. But what was good for
the new economy was bad for the old. And like a line of dominoes, his overleveraged
businesses began to fail, one after another.

The first to go was the Back Yard Burgers in Danville. Almost immediately, weekly
sales dropped 30 percent, from $17,000 to $12,000. In fast food, the break-even was
around $12,500. As his customers’ disposable income dried up, they decided that they
couldn’t afford $5.50 for a cheeseburger and fries and went across the mall to pay
$4.50 at McDonald’s. That dollar difference was all it took, and the collapse happened
in less than sixty days. The next year, Dean lost $150,000 on the restaurant and had
to get rid of it.

But Dean had made a big mistake, which was to put all his stores and restaurants under
one corporate entity—Red Birch of Martinsville, Inc.—on one banknote. So when a crack
appeared in one wall, the whole edifice started to fall down, and because he was in
trouble with one restaurant, he couldn’t get a loan to keep the others going. The
next one to go was the truck stop near the Martinsville Speedway: Bojangles’ exercised
its option to pull the franchise in late 2009, and he had to close the truck stop
in early 2010. After that, he closed the stand-alone Bojangles’ restaurant in Martinsville.
He made enough on the sale of both to pay off the bank, but some of his vendors became
his creditors. Whatever money had been left from the sale of the Stokesdale store
to the Indians went up in smoke. “I made a million dollars,” Dean said, “and I lost
a million dollars.”

The economic crisis wasn’t the only culprit. Dean had lost all interest in the stores
and delegated the management to an accountant in Martinsville, and his employees were
ripping him off. Dean’s friend Howard said, “Dean wouldn’t check on those people—they
was stealing him blind. He was bringing it in the front door with a damn teaspoon,
they was taking it out the back door with a shovel. They just robbed him blind. The
one in Bassett was one of the main culprits. He just didn’t have sense enough.”

“I was concentrating on biodiesel,” Dean said. But it turned out that his dream of
the future depended on his past. When his businesses started to fail, the domino standing
at the end of the line was America’s 1st BioDiesel Truck Stop.

RADISH QUEEN: ALICE WATERS

Alice was passionate about beauty—she wanted it around her all the time. She lived
intensely through her senses and arranged fresh flowers everywhere and knew to leave
the western windows uncurtained to flood the restaurant with golden afternoon light.
Her palate was infallible, her food memory indelible. If she said, “This needs a little
more lemon,” it did. And the dishes were pure simplicity and delight: winter root-vegetable
soup, mesclun salad with goat cheese, roast pork, asparagus vinaigrette, tarte tatin.

Her favorite word was
delicious
, and her favorite poem, which once hung above her kitchen table in Berkeley in the
sixties, was by Wallace Stevens: while Huns are slaughtering eleven thousand virgins
and her own martyrdom is imminent, Saint Ursula makes an offering of radishes and
flowers to the Lord, who

felt a subtle quiver,

that was not heavenly love,

or pity.

Instead of the slaughter, Alice, too, saw radishes and flowers, and in them she saw
her heart’s desire. She was always falling in love—with a dish, a coat, a man, an
idea—and she seldom failed to get what she wanted, sparing no expense (she was forever
careless about money), because the tiny frame and rushed-off-her-feet manner and nervous
girlish voice and hands on your arm concealed an iron will.

There were two major epiphanies in Alice’s life. The first was about beauty, and it
came to her in France, the country that represented everything that was pleasing to
the senses. In 1965, she took a semester off from Berkeley just after the heady rush
of the Free Speech Movement and went with a friend to study in Paris, where they soon
drifted away from their coursework and lost themselves in onion soup, Gauloises cigarettes,
outdoor markets, and Frenchmen. On a trip to Brittany, Alice and her friend dined
in a little stone house with a dozen tables upstairs under pink tablecloths. The windows
gave out onto a stream and a garden that had just yielded their trout and raspberries.
At the end of the meal, everyone in the restaurant burst into applause and cried out
to the chef,
“C’est fantastique!”

That was how Alice wanted to live—like a Frenchwoman, in a tightly wound cloche from
the 1920s, baguettes with apricot jam and café au lait in the mornings, long afternoons
in a café, spectacularly fresh dinners like the one in Brittany. In fact, she wanted
to run the restaurant herself, feeding her friends while they sat for hours and talked
about film, flirted, laughed, danced. But she would bring her Francophilic dreams
back to puritanical, mass-produced America.

Alice loved the revolutionary atmosphere of Berkeley in the late 1960s, but hers was
going to be a revolution of the senses, a communal experience of pleasure. Around
1970 eating in America was a mix of fussy French restaurant cuisine and Swanson’s
frozen dinners. McDonald’s served its five billionth burger in 1969, its ten billionth
in 1972. And between those landmarks, in the summer of 1971, Chez Panisse, named for
a character in an old Marcel Pagnol film, opened its doors on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley.

The menu offered only one choice of meal, written on a blackboard:

Pâté en croûte

Canard aux olives

Plum tart

Café

$3.95

The line stretched out the door. Some people had to wait two hours for their entrée.
Others were never seated that night. Inside the kitchen all was chaos, but the dining
room was gastronomic heaven. All the ingredients came from local sources—the ducks
from Chinatown in San Francisco, the produce from a Japanese concession—and the plums,
from local trees, were at their ripest. Alice, at age twenty-seven, had started something.

Chez Panisse was an ongoing celebration of food of a particular kind—grown locally
and seasonally. Alice and her staff foraged around the Bay Area for ingredients, sometimes
literally in streams and along railroad tracks for the greens and berries they wanted.
She was appalled by the thought of serving food that had been frozen or trucked in
from out of state. Once, the frozen food industry held a contest to see if expert
panelists could tell fresh from frozen—twenty versions of the same ingredient, fresh
or frozen, cooked in various dishes. Alice got every single one right.

The restaurant celebrated something else: bohemia. The atmosphere was open and informal,
within the extreme snobbery of fresh ingredients and simple cooking. The staff had
affairs with one another (none more than Alice—she liked her attachments without obligations),
the restaurant was financed with hippie drug money, chefs did coke to keep themselves
going, waiters took a toke on their way into the dining room, busboys stuffed opium
up the ass before their shift (to avoid nausea), and at the end of the night there
was dancing in the dining room. Alice was an inspiring, critical, and chaotic leader,
and years went by in the red, and several times the whole thing nearly came crashing
down, but always the little delicate-featured woman with the hair cut short would
say, “It can be done, it will be done, it’s going to happen, you’ll see.”

And Chez Panisse celebrated one other thing: itself, endlessly.

It took years for Chez Panisse to become the best-known restaurant in America. In
the 1980s, the food scene took off around the country, and young people with new money
wanted to eat only the best things, or at least be told they were doing so. Alice’s
restaurant became a place where wealth and celebrity went to be seen. By the 1990s
she was a national figure. She embraced the gospel of virtuous food, insisting that
her produce be strictly organic and that her meat come from animals that had been
reasonably happy before their slaughter. She spread the good news of sustainability
everywhere she went, telling anyone who would listen, “Good food is a right, not a
privilege,” and “How we eat can change the world,” and “Beauty is not a luxury.” Alice
became a moralist of pleasure, a bohemian scold, holding delicious fundraising dinners
for Bill Clinton, then following up with hectoring letters to the young president
and First Lady urging them to plant a vegetable garden on the White House lawn as
a model for America. To her dismay, they never did, but the country seemed to be catching
up with her message as couples in big cities frequented farmers’ markets on Saturdays
to buy their heirloom tomatoes and porcini mushrooms. Among people who could afford
to care, no word was held in higher esteem than
organic.
It carried a sanctifying power.

In the midnineties, Alice had her second epiphany. This one began with ugliness. One
day, a local reporter interviewed her at Chez Panisse, and as they discussed agriculture
in empty urban lots, she suddenly said, “You want to see a great example of how not
to use land? You should come look at this enormous school in my neighborhood that
looks like nobody cares about it. Everything wrong with our world is bound up in that
place.” It was the Martin Luther King Middle School, whose concrete buildings and
blacktop playground she drove past every day, thinking they might be abandoned. The
quote made it into the paper, the principal saw it, and before long Alice was invited
to see the school, and maybe do something about it.

What Alice did was to ask if she could plant a vegetable garden on a neglected acre
of land at the edge of the school grounds. She had seen the food sold to the kids—something
called a “walking taco,” a plastic bag full of corn chips drowned in a beef-and-tomato
mess spooned from a can—and to her it symbolized a completely broken culture. Fast
food wasn’t just unhealthful, it spread bad values. She had a grand idea: the students
would grow kale and bok choy and dozens of other things in the garden; prepare a nutritious,
delicious meal in a school kitchen (currently closed for lack of repair money); and
sit down together to eat it in the communal way that had disappeared from their hectic,
dysfunctional homes, learning basic table etiquette as they ate and awakening their
senses to a new relationship with food.